Samsung Tocco Icon - Review

“Smartphone-aping feature phone loaded with functions, but with a touchscreen that’s a little on the tough side”

Samsung Tocco Icon - Fanatical about Apps

Packing a touchscreen, social networking apps, internet, a camera and more for around £80 sim-free, Samsung’s Tocco Icon aims to bridge the gap between the smartphone and a regular handset.

However, while there is no doubt that it packs in a lot of features for the price, there is also ample evidence that it tries to do too much for too little, with the insensitive, unadjustable touchscreen making the Tocco Icon infuriating to use.

If you are able to get used to that and don’t encounter the connectivity issues that blighted our review model, then the Tocco Icon does give you something of the smartphone experience at a fraction of the price, but it’s fair to say that there are other handsets that do it better.

Tocco Icon(black) £49.95

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Looks and longevity

The Tocco Icon is a neat and compact take on the typical smartphone format, but its three-inch touchscreen means that it will slide into your pocket far more easily than the likes of a HTC Sensation.

While its thickness and squareness make it look a little dated compared to the sleek build of higher end smartphones, it feels reliably solid and weighty.

The back cover, although it peels away easily, does feel worryingly flimsy though, while the five physical buttons feel sturdy, if not particularly satisfying.

One advantage that the Tocco Icon certainly does have over more power-hungry handsets is battery life.

While you’d be lucky to get more than a day and a half out of most top-of-the range smartphones, the Tocco Icon’s battery life has a lot more in common with a basic feature phone and could last for days with careful use.

The call clarity is very clear and reception stable, while the volume goes high enough to ensure you can hear callers on busy streets and noisy buses.

Smart features for a feature phone

Despite the Tocco Icon being built to a budget, Samsung has included the full range of features that all modern handsets should have.

The 3.2 megapixel camera is pretty standard for this kind of handset. This one takes fair pictures close up, but the results lack-definition when produced over distance or in bright light.

The camcorder however, is surprisingly good for a mid-range phone, coping well with both close ups and distance shots as well as motion and changes in light.

The music player also has a few nice touches, including a share function, a music recognition feature and a “find similar” option.

Through earphones music sounds loud, but could stand to be louder. The speaker is surprisingly boisterous although, as is the nature of mobile speakers, it copes far better with high-end than low-end sounds.

Lacking sensitivity

However, it’s when you begin to test the Samsung Tocco Icon’s more smartphone-esque features that the phone starts to get frustrating.

The touchscreen isn’t very sensitive and makes tasks such as tapping and dragging widgets and even unlocking the phone soon become annoying.

Having said that, as with certain features on every phone, using the touchscreen becomes less irksome the more you use it, and its lack of responsiveness might even prove useful to the heavier of hand.

Operating system

Because the Tocco Icon isn’t a smartphone, it uses Samsung’s own operating system, and while this limits what you can do with the phone, it also makes it a very simple handset to get to grips with.

The revolving homepage is useful, mirroring that found on flagship handsets like the HTC Sensation, allowing you to keep up to seven different screens of widgets instantly to hand.

Annoyingly though, it doesn’t revolve all the way around, so if you are on the first screen you have to flick all the way back to get to the beginning again.

The “virtual” buttons at the bottom of the screen are also very useful, allowing you to access the keypad, your contacts or your messages no matter which menu you’re in.

But the lack of a “back” button seems to be a glaring omission, especially as one of the physical buttons - the “dial key” - does nothing when you are in a menu or online.

Getting online

While the Tocco Icon isn’t designed with hours of web surfing in mind, we were disappointed with its online performance.

Getting on the web proved tricky in the first place and once there, attempting to download emails from a Hotmail account via a widget was continually met with a response of “Connection Failed”.

Attempts to sign-in to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter using the included widgets resulted in a “Disconnected” response.

Although accessing YouTube was possible, getting videos to actually play proved a challenge - even after being told there wasn’t enough onboard memory and adding a 1GB microSD card.

But browsing the web in general was easy as long as you stayed away from video and audio, making the Tocco Icon handy for checking the news headlines even if updating your status may prove something of a challenge.

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