Samsung has been busy recently, jumping on the Android bandwagon, but now it has gone back to its origins and the Tocco range – this time with the Samsung Tocco Icon.

First impressions

First off, with its angular design and silver edging, the Tocco Icon has a touch of the iPhone 4 about it. But its very lightweight (only 94g), thanks to its plastic body, so even with a capacitive touch-display it feels rather cheap. It looks pretty smooth, with a soft menu button at the base of the display, with its dialler soft buttons on either side. 

TouchWiz

If you haven’t used a smartphone before, you’ll probably enjoy Samsung’s TouchWiz interface, but for anyone used to a responsive touch display, you’ll find the handset too slow. While the screen is an improvement on the original Tocco, it’s still not as fast as we’d hoped. We found typing a tad slow, even when using the QWERTY keyboard in landscape mode, and in portrait format, you’ll be greeted by an alphanumeric keypad. 

Screen play

The capacitive touch-display measures three inches, which means everything’s a bit cramped if you’re trying to type emails and messages, but if you’re surfing the net it’s good enough. We weren't expecting much from a screen with a resolution of 240x400 pixels, but it does benefit from high contrast and vivid colours.

Connectivity

We were impressed with the connectivity on offer from a device at this price – if offers Bluetooth, 2G and Wi-Fi. There’s no 3G, though, and 2G is rather sluggish – however, if you can connect to Wi-Fi then you’ll be okay.

What came as a disappointment was social networking. It’s a pity that we couldn't take full advantage of the Samsung Tocco Icon, because we couldn’t gain access to our social networks. We tried over and over again and had no luck whatsoever, even when we tried to tweak the settings and connect via Wi-Fi. So we’ll have to make a guess that had we managed to log on we might have been quite impressed as the Tocco Icon can share media and details with Facebook, Google and Twitter.

Media player

If you want to listen to your favourite tunes, you’ll benefit from the Tocco Icon’s decent sound quality (with headphones), as well as some loud speakers – but be aware that you’ll have to splash out for your own headphones, as Samsung hasn’t even included a pair of earphones. But it’s not really a suitable media phone – there is distortion at higher volume levels, and the sound is not well balanced – nor is there any way to improve that. Also there is no way of storing much in the way of media as there is only 30MB of onboard storage. You could spend some more money on a 16GB microSD card if you wanted, though.

The Tocco Icon also suffers because it has little in the way of outstanding apps – and we found the Samsung App store pretty disappointing.

Snapper

If you want to take photos, you’ll be using a 3.15 megapixel snapper (it’s the same as the one on the Sony Ericsson Xperia X8). In daylight you’ll end up with decent images, but any pictures taken in low light display noise and pixilation.

Battery

The good news is that the battery has a long life – mostly because there is a juice-draining 3G on board. We didn’t have to charge for a couple of days – pretty amazing for a smartphone.

Our conclusion

The Tocco Icon manages to do all the basic tasks, plus you can listen to a bit of music and do a bit of tweeting. And if you haven’t had a smartphone before, it’s a good enough choice, especially at less than £100. If you like to do a lot of net surfing, you’ll not be pleased with the absence of 3G (even if it does save on battery usage). Other disappointments are the lack of apps – however, it does look good and offers Wi-Fi.