Samsung Tocco Lite

The Samsung Tocco Lite is an affordable mobile phone with some better features than we would expect at the price. It’s relatively small but still manages to fit in a 3in touchscreen, weighs just 94g and works in Europe and America.

While the screen doesn’t really suffer from the small size, the connectivity of the phone does. Our biggest frustration with the phone is the proprietary socket on the edge for charging and the hands-free headset. It’s hard to see how a full size audio socket would fit on the phone but it’s a shame that Samsung hasn’t included an adapter in the box so you can use your own headphones.

Apart from that we were happy with the accessories we found in the box. There’s a charger, USB adapter and headset. A CD with the Samsung PC Studio is also included.

The home screen has covers three screens using a swiping finger to switch between them. This does highlight one of the slight shortcomings of the Tocco Lite, which, as a budget phone, is that it has a fairly slow processor. It didn’t stop us from doing anything but the animations were not as smooth as more expensive smartphones.

There’s a bar at the side of the home screen for adding widgets to the home screen including clocks, calendars, links to Facebook and Youtube and photos on the phone. There’s no Wifi on the phone, so make sure that data is included on the mobile plan. There is an FM radio.

The camera is a 3.2 megapixel with no flash but only 50MB of internal memory. This can be expanded using MicroSD cards. Strangely it is not possible to swap cards without removing the battery to access the slot even though access to the SIM is not blocked.

One interesting extra is handwriting recognition, something not but only one character at a time. That’s frustrating for anyone used to the handwriting features in more capable.

If you don’t want features such as Wifi or GPS, the Samsung Tocco Lite is a capable phone. The interface may be a little slow at times but it’s small and great value. We found the Tocco Lite for as little as £10 a month on contract or around £70 on pay as you go.