The Tocco range has been a success for Samsung so far. The range comprises three handsets: the Tocco (Italian for touch) was the first to go on sale back in May 2008; the Tocco Ultra followed a year later, laden with high-end features; and the Tocco Lite, which has proved to be the biggest seller in the six months since it was released. In fact, worldwide sales top 10 million, making it Samsung’s most popular phone ever. That has to be worth a second look.

Style and handling for the Samsung Tocco Lite

The Samsung Tocco Lite looks and feels very like the first Tocco. It’s the same pocket-friendly size, nicely weighted in the hand and the right width too, with a resistive touch-screen (the Ultra’s screen was capacitive in line with its higher specs).

The Samsung TouchWiz UI is present and correct, and reassuringly familiar. The pull-out widget bar on the left-hand side of the screen allows you to drag and drop any of the icons onto one of the phone’s three home screens, and a “More widgets” option allows you to download additional widgets from third parties including the BBC and CNN. When dragged on to the home screen, the widgets effectively become live feeds, albeit ones that need to be refreshed manually to get the latest updates.

Resistive touch screen on the Samsung Tocco Lite

We’ve gone over the superiority of capacitive touch-screens many times, but these are generally reserved for the high-end smartphone. It’s a shame, because no matter how good your resistive touch-screen is, it will never match up. This is amply demonstrated on the Tocco’s resistive screen: a light scroll on the widget bar is likely to result in mistakenly opening an application. The way to do it is to leave your finger on the screen for a second before scrolling. There’s nothing wrong with the screen – the calibration is just fine – but it does take a bit of getting used to, especially if you are used to a capacitive screen.

The hit-and-miss nature of the screen also comes to light when browsing the web. To zoom you hold your finger down on the display to activate zoom mode, then move your finger up or down to zoom in or out respectively. It does work well, but we did find that ourselves zooming when we only wanted to scroll.

Social networking on the Samsung Tocco Lite

The Samsung Tocco Lite is clearly aimed at keen social networkers, with embedded shortcuts to Facebook, MySpace and Flickr as well as sites like Friendster and Photobucket. You can upload photos and videos directly to any of these sites. Along with the affordable price tag, the Tocco Lite is bound to be a success with younger users.

It does seem odd that such a social networking-centric device doesn’t have 3G connectivity – it does slow down site loading, so you will need to be patient.

The 3.15-megapixel camera is good enough to capture Facebook-friendly snaps, but with no flash and few scenery modes, you’ll not be winning any awards.

The verdict on the  Tocco Lite

It’s easy to see why the Samsung Tocco Lite has proved to be so popular: it’s sleek, the screen is bright and vibrant, and social networking is made easy. It’s got flaws, certainly, and doesn’t set the mobile world alight, but it’s a good mid-tier handset that appeals to the younger user.

You can buy the Tocco Lite by Clicking Here