Toshiba TG01 review

But it’s back down to earth with a bump when it comes to battery life, which is well below par for a modern smartphone. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised, given that the TG01 mates a powerful 1GHz pocessor with a tiny 1,000mAh battery, but the results were disappointing even then. In our real world test, in which we make half an hour’s worth of calls, 50MB of downloads and leave the phone polling email every half an hour until it runs out of juice, the TG01 lasted 42hrs before giving up the ghost. That’s just one day and 18hours, well behind phones such as the HTC Touch HD and also its rival the iPhone.

So despite its slim dimensions, and its large, high resolution screen, we find it impossible to recommend the TG01. Why? Simply because Toshiba has done such a poor job of putting together a usable package, with a finger-unfriendly front end, a terrible web-browsing experience and average text entry, that not even the strongest hardware package in the world would be good enough to outweigh it. The fact that the battery is non-user replaceable and the phone locked to Orange is simply the final nail in the lid of a very securely-fastened coffin.