Photos: Hands-on with Samsung Tocco Lite

We just had a playdate with the Samsung Tocco Lite, the budget baby of the Tocco line, which ditches 3G and fancy AMOLED screens to make a pocket-friendly alternative

Flora Graham

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Flora Graham

June 23, 2009 5:24 a.m. PT

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Whether you spend your student loan on a Samsung i8910 HD or sell your liver for a new iPhone, the current mania for fancy touchscreens can make a hefty dent in your overdraft.

But luckily the finger-tapping goodness is trickling its way down to cheaper phones, such as the Samsung Tocco Lite. We got our hands on the reasonably priced niceness to see if a phone that's free on a £15-per-month contract from Virgin Media can still get our gadget juices flowing.

At 93g, the Tocco Lite is indeed light, with the same form-factor as the popular Tocco. Its 76mm (3-inch) screen is bright, although it can't live up to the spectacular standards set by its pricier cousin, the Tocco Ultra, which has a capacitive AMOLED screen that makes us want to leave our families and run away with it.

The touchscreen is the resistive kind, which means you have to apply some pressure to make it register your desires. We're definitely not fans of these types of screens -- they don't feel nearly as responsive as the capacitive type. But we were pleasantly surprised with the Tocco Lite. It still needs a little fingernail action once in a while to get a peppy response, but we didn't feel the urge to get out a stylus and start tapping like it's 1999.

Click the image for more on this pocket-friendly phone's features.

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The Tocco Lite has a small selection of widgets you can drag around to customise its three home screens, which you can switch between with the swipe of a finger. Some of the widgets are better than others -- the music player, FM radio and weather widget are nice, but the Facebook widget is just a link to the Facebook mobile Web page, so you won't get live updates like you would from a more integrated phone such as the INQ 1.

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The 3.2-megapixel camera doesn't have a photo light, but it has a good range of settings. For example, smile detection waits until the subject is smiling before it fires off the photo. There are also lots of editing options, so you can sort out your photos without moving them on to a computer.

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There are built-in profiles to help you upload your images and video to sites such as Facebook and Picasa, but without Wi-Fi, HSPA or even 3G, you may have to wait a while for that upload to happen.

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The Tocco Lite has a smartly textured plastic back and the 3.2-megapixel camera has a little mirror for those all-important self-portraits.

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At 12mm thick, the Tocco Lite is slim and trim. There's no 3.5mm headphone jack though, so you'll have to use an adaptor to plug in your headphones. Curses.