News

"Finally, viable cameras on WinMo devices!" - review of Tosh phone

Windows Mobile phones: all made by HTC, right? Well, almost, but not quite: Toshiba has released the Portege-G18 and according to the latest review, it's up there with the iPhone and the Touch Diamond.

Lisa Gade notes first that it's a finger, not purely a stylus, interface. It has a stylus, but it's a "flush display," along iPhone lines. No, she's not claiming it's "as good as" the iPhone, but acknowledging that this is a trend:

"Touch screens: now the rage thanks to the iPhone, though they've been around for a decade in Windows Mobile and Palm OS handhelds and (more recently) phones. But there is a difference, however subtle: the iPhone and its flush-screen competitors are finger friendly, while the old PDA paradigm carried over to smartphones is stylus-centric. 

"And there's the rub-- all those folks who don't want to be bothered with ever-lose-able and inconvenient piece of plastic. Toshiba doesn't make many Windows Mobile phones (they were once a large player in the Pocket PC PDA market), but when they do, they go for cutting-edge features and trendy elements. I doubt the touch screen will become unfashionable any time soon, so Toshiba's bet on a flush screen Windows Mobile Professional phone with touch software was a good one." ...as she summarised in this week's review.  And also, she enthuses, it has a pretty useful camera - for a phone.

The review is too long and too detailed to summarise easily. But her remarks on the camera particularly:

"The Toshiba's 3 megapixel camera is a breath of fresh air among WinMo smartphone whose photos are generally mediocre, despite seemingly good specs. The Portege G810 takes excellent photos that are clear, sharp (but not artificially sharpened), colorful and natural.

"It particularly excels at outdoors shots, where it manages to beat the Nokia N78, an imaging-oriented 3MP smartphone that was also recently released. The N78's images are over-sharpened and have less natural colors in comparison. The G810 easily beats the more business-oriented Nokia E66 with 3MP autofocus lens, whose shots are sub-par for the spec (and for Nokia). Our HTC Touch Diamond takes very good shots, but the Toshiba's are better." The drawback, she admits, is that (like almost all phone cameras) there's the horrible latency - a long time passes between pressing the button, and taking the picture.

"Image capture times are slow and there's a pronounced lag after pressing the shutter button before the image is captured/saved. We're talking 2 to 3 seconds for 2MP and 3MP resolution images saved to a card - shave less than 1/3 second off that if saving to internal memory. This means you must hold the camera still until you see the on-screen indicator that the image is captured, or you'll have a blurry photo. Also forget taking that kitten or child doing something split-second cute..."

Full Mobile Tech Review article