MWC 2009
Toshiba was showing off an early prototype of its recently announced TG01 smartphone. This thin phone sports Windows Mobile and a ginormous touch screen display.
The hardware was gorgeous. Think of the white iPhone, only thinner and bigger. It has nice quality plastics, well-rounded edges and a thin stripe of chrome encircling the entire body. The only physical buttons are along the phone's side, where you'll see a camera button, volume toggle and locking key. They all had decent travel and feedback and were easily found.
The front of the TG01 is dominated by the display, which measures 4.1 inches and rates WVGA resolution. It looked very good, but not as good as some of the AMOLED displays we've seen at the show.
The display is touch sensitive, though the user interface wasn't very responsive. Toshiba told us that the hardware they had on hand was very early prototypes, and it showed on the software side of things.
The vertically striped user interface overlay that sits on top of Windows Mobile could be usable if the phone weren't so slow. I have a hard time believing the spec'd 1GHz Snapdragon processor was really in there. The phone took ages to respond, was very buggy, and randomly opened applications and screens that the user didn't touch. You can see some of the bugginess on the video (below). The stripes each contain a number of application shortcuts, and this can be customized to the user's content. If you swipe your finger sideways across the stripes, they will re-order themselves. I can't really figure out how this is useful, because it just switched around the existing set of stripes and didn't change to show different applications/shortcuts. But it sure looked like fun to play with.
Aside from the large screen, there are some other impressive specs for the TG01. It will come with quad-band GSM/EDGE radios, but only supports HSDPA/HSUPA 2100 (for Europe). It has a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus, and can playback MP3s and other video.
There are two touch-capacitive buttons at the very bottom of the screen, which seemed to be the most reliable way to get the TG01 to do anything.
We'll be happy to revisit the TG01 once it is more final form and we can get a better idea of just how well the Snapdragon processor works.
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