Toshiba TS 803 3G Phone Review

When Toshiba’s debut UK mobile arrived at 3G , we were impressed but not overly excited. The TS 921 was a powerful 3G handset alright, but it neither broke new ground nor set the world alight with killer features.

At the time Toshiba promised there was more to come from a stable of handsets that’s been going great guns in Japan for years, and it looks as if the company wasn’t jesting: it has quickly moved from the solid and dependable 3G brick of the TS 921 – a mobile with a girth that needed some serious supplies to navigate round – to a full-on music mobile with a stellar headline act in the form of a sponsorship deal for exclusive Oasis content. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together and welcome on stage… Toshiba’s TS 803!

Okay, so the 803 is still a chunky handset – more Luther Vandros than Beyoncé – but compared to its predecessor, it’s had a complete style makeover: millimetres have been shaved off here and there, ounces shed and the edges curved and softened to make this a considerably more attractive proposition. It also comes bundled with a 512MB miniSD card chock-full of Oasis goodies. And if your taste in music doesn’t extend to the squabbling Mancs, you can wipe it all and start again with your own tunes.

Some things haven’t changed though – once again Toshiba bring us a clamshell that’s exclusive to Vodafone. Open it up and you’re greeted with a stylish collection of buttons and an intuitive dual circle navi-pad that looks odd at first but works well in practice. The keyboard actually put us in mind of one of Nokia’s style phones, which is a big step forward for Tosh. But the highlight here is the screen, a clear and bright 240x320 number with 260,000 colours, which has been ported over from the TS 921.

Before we move onto what this handset can do, there’s another major change on the outside in the shape of a four-way rocker switch designed to aid music playback. After the race to slim down handsets to micro proportions, the ability to carry a tune is rapidly taking shape as this season’s feature du jour, with Toshiba joining Nokia and Sony Ericsson in attempting to knock Motorola’s disappointing ROKR out of contention.

The good news for all you rock‘n’rollers in the audience is that the TS 803 is an excellent music mobile, with a killer combination of easy-to-use controls, simple set-up and sound quality that’s in the iPod league when it comes to portable audio. For starters, getting your tunes onto the handset isn’t a million miles away from updating an MP3 player. All the software and cables are supplied in the box along with that 512MB card, and while we’d like to see the transfer speeds associated with USB 2.0 moving across to mobiles, the process was relatively quick and painless. While the music software isn’t as fluid as iTunes on the ROKR, it’s still easy to operate, and the 803 beats the ROKR hands down.

Playing the music once it’s installed is a simple affair, with the controls and external screen providing you with easy access to an intuitive menu screen and responsive files. Playback is also very impressive with the supplied headphones, although moving up to a pair of simple in-ear numbers from Sennheiser improved matters further, adding more bass and a clearer mid-range to a performance that was already good.

But entertainment today isn’t just about music; the DVD generation also demands video footage, and here the Toshiba’s clear screen comes into its own. Okay, it may not have the girth of the latest PDA-style smartphones but, with downloaded content off the Vodafone Live! service, it’s highly impressive. We even managed to follow the ball on the exclusive highlights from England’s mixed bag of a tour in Pakistan. Music videos also get the full treatment, with plenty of razzle to go with handset’s all-round dazzle.

Getting away from entertainment, the TS 803 also has a solid hand of features and organisational tools, with a decent suite of contact and diary software on board so you can keep in touch with all the rock stars you actually know personally. If, like us, that’s exactly none, then how about some paparazzi-style shots with the phone’s highly specified 2.26-megapixel snapper. Image quality is some of the best we’ve experienced from a phone that doesn’t specifically play on this feature, for example by adding a top-notch Carl Zeiss lens. While we still wouldn’t consider framing the results and certainly wouldn’t rely on them to record special events, the pictures from this camera are more than good enough for email use, and with a decent printer you could even try your hand at making a few hard copies.

The phone also supports several video recording modes but as usual, these lag behind the still photography market and should be reserved purely for MMS messages or storing on your PC for insurance claims. Video calling is better served, however, although how good you look at the other end rather depends on the quality of the handset you are communicating with. The calls we made were glitch free and suffered no dropout, and that goes for voice as well as video.

Toshiba is obviously serious about becoming a serious contender in the UK mobile market, and the 803 has set a marker down about what to expect from future releases. But right here, right now, this is an excellent 3G handset with a great feature list and top-notch performance. In terms of music playback, it lags behind the highly impressive Sony Ericsson Walkman collection, just, but with a shedful of features and that bundled miniSD card, we reckon that Toshiba is heading for the big time.

This review covers the above mobile phone only and does not address the performance of any 3G Network. The score is based on a 3G mobile phone checklist.

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