Samsung F480 Tocco

It might bear more than a passing resemblance to the iPhone 3G but the touch screen-toting Tocco manages to outfox Apple in the size stakes – it’s a pocket-friendly 11.6mm thin to the iPhone’s 12.3mm – and Samsung has managed to stuff an iPhone-trumping five-megapixel camera inside that size-zero frame.

The camera comes loaded with features to help improve your shots, including auto focus, an image stabilizer to ward off shaky-hand blurring, plus face and smile detection. The former can recognize when there’s someone’s face in your sights and adjusts settings to boost the portrait quality, while the latter is cleverer still: push the button and the shutter won’t click until your subject shows off their pearly whites. Yep, this camera is brainy enough to know what a smile looks like (and yes, it really does work). The only notable absentee on the high-end photography checklist is an ultra-bright Xenon flash – but the LED-powered photo lamp is decent enough for basic nocturnal snapping.

You can’t miss the Tocco’s large, iPhone-style touch screen, but while it comes with some neat functions – mainly the ability to let the user drag and drop shortcuts to his or her favourite applications and widgets on to the home screen – it’s certainly not as finger-friendly as Apple’s multi-touch display. Scrolling by dragging your digit down or across the screen is possible, but it just doesn’t have the slick fluidity of the iPhone.

Web-heads get a speedy 7.2Mbps HSDPA connection for browsing sites and downloading files, but there’s no sign of an accompanying Wi-Fi option, which is a disappointment on a handset as well-equipped as this. The web browser itself is functional, but again the iPhone betters it – there’s no zooming into pages for easier reading, for instance.

Verdict
Easy on the eye and the jean pocket, and sporting a cracking camera, the Tocco is one of the better iPhone wannabes out there.

Overall
4 out of 5

Love it
Slim, stylish and solid build
Top notch camera

Loathe it
Where’s the Wi-Fi?
The touch screen isn’t a patch on the iPhone’s

Visit the Samsung F480 Tocco product page >>

Also consider
LG KU990 Viewty
Another touch screen wizard with slick camera and video skills, but it’s fatter than the Tocco.

Nokia N82
No touch screen here, but it’s one of the finest camera phones around.

Sony Ericsson C902
Card-thin and boasting supreme photo skills, the C902 is another corking camera phone from Sony Ericsson.

Get chatting about the latest touch screen mobile phones over at the PriceRunner forum.

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