Sum n substance:

Thumbs up: Pocket friendly price, excellent battery life, good call quality, decent touch screen performance.

Thumbs down: No 3.5 mm headphone jack, poor image quality, absence of 3G and Wi-Fi.

Inside the trunk:

• Price at launch £140.00
• Connectivity USB 2.0
• Dimensions 106 x 53.5 x 11.9
• Weight (g) 93.50
• Battery Type Standard battery, Li-Ion 1000 mAh
• Camera Resolution 3.15

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS: This one is the youngest one from the Tocco family. After the Samsung Tocco F480 and the Tocco Ultra Edition S8300 comes in the Samsung Tocco Lite S5230. This latest one is peeled off a few features that its older siblings had to offer, but I guess this was done to make the price more pocket friendly as this one claims to give the user an affordable touchscreen experience.

Razzle- dazzle: This one doesn’t stand out to be any different from the basic design of the other members of the Tocco family. Its got the basic black glossy look with a bare to the bones classy design which almost of the touchscreens after the iPhone have been adhering to. For all those who are bored of the black, this one is being offered in flashy pink and pure white versions too. It’s got curved edges to add to its swish looks and at 92g this one is quite lightweight plus its got some texturing on the back which allows for some good grip. Also at 106(h) x 53.5(w) x 11.9(d) mm this one fits quite conveniently into the pocket or in any clutch.

With this one Samsung has surely gone minimal, on the front side it has the touchscreen display and below it there is the navigation toggle along with the talk and end buttons. The display is quite bright and clear though it faces a few problems when directly under the sun, but then again most of the touchscreens have this glitch. It works absolutely fine otherwise.

The right side houses the camera button and the lock/unlock key and the other side houses the volume/zoom rocker control, multi-connector socket for USB cable, charger and the earphones jacks. The lock/unlock facility functioned properly most of the times but on a few occasions got unlocked on its own in the pocket and also a few widgets were activated though no calls were made.

Inside dope: Though Samsung has compromised on quite a few features with this one it has retained the TouchWiz UI like in the others from the Tocco family and the Jet. The interface can easily be managed by swiping the finger over the screen. This one being more of a resistive display, doesnot have the smart multi-touch feature.

The 3 buttons on the standby screen are for stimulating the numberpad, the contact book and the main menu. The numbers on the numberpad have been comfortably placed to avoid any mispresses and it well quite succeeds in achieving this. The phonebook can be used to find a number in three ways. Either swiping down through the whole list or directly typing the name on the search bar. The other option that it offers is searching through sections letter by letter. It also has an option of photo contacts, using which all your recent contacts photos will pop up on the screen in a grid like fashion and all you have to do is click on the photo to make a call.

Coming to messaging… with the roomy virtual pad that this one has to offer, messaging is made a bit less harrowing an experience than most of the touchscreen phones. Though, most heavy texters might find this touchscreen a bit of a hassle compared to the conventional phones I guess this is the most Samsung could do to help them. The T9 option offered with this one does take some time to get used to. It also has a handwriting recognition mode which works just fine. One complain that I have with the Samsung phones is that when you are typing the text you do not come to know if you have crosses the on page limit, its only when you go ahead with sending the message do you come to know if you have crosses the limit. This offers an email service too, using the regular POP3/IMAP4/SMTP accounts.

The call quality that this one has to offer is pretty much impressive with hardly any static or interference. The sound quality was pretty much audible and clear with no echo effects. Even the callers on the other end had no complains with most of them not even coming to know that I was using a celllphone.

This one offers a nice comfortably big screen for browsing the web and using the internet but then again it does not support 3G or Wi-Fi connectivity for faster speeds. Using the GPRS or the EDGE services takes up a lot of time. The Samsung browser is also hassle free as compared to most of the competition that it faces.

This one comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera but by the looks of it, it looks like this one is surely not an imaging device. It lacks even the basic LED flash. The images appear to be a bit oversaturated at times and also with close ups, the quality of the photographs isn’t crisp enough. It’s got the fun frames and the smile detection feature along with a colourisation and timer effect. Its kind of shoot-and- wish kind of a scenario with this kind of a camera. I wish Samsung had come up with something better in this department.

The music player though not as high end as the  one offered by the iPhone is decent enough. The audio quality through the speakers is quite decent just with some added bass which could be avoided by using the earphone( yeah this one doesn’t have a 3.5mm  headphone jack). Video streaming can get grainy and discontinuity may occur because of the low speeds.

The Tocco lite battery life has been estimated to be around 10 hours of talktime and about 600 hours in standby mode which brilliant enough and this iss possible because of the absence of the 3G and Wi-Fi services.

Nitty- gritty: I would recommend this one to anyone to wants to be in touch control at a budget price. Though this one doesn’t have a lot of features, the price it is being offered for makes up for it.

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