Toshiba TG01 Hands-On

[Nurhisham Hussein]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.slashgear.com/orange-toshiba-tg01-hands-on-video-gallery-0948950/' target='_blank'>http://www.slashgear.com/orange-tos...allery-0948950/</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"As you've probably seen, Orange launched the Toshiba TG01 today, and SlashGear went along to the launch event 31 floors above the city of London. There's not much about this smartphone we didn't already know - after all, we were also there in February when it officially debuted - but today was an opportunity to play with the Orange branded version and the latest firmware."</em></p><p><object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="480" height="298" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="http://vms.slashgear.tv/sgtv/sgtv_player.swf" /><param name="name" value="SlashGearTV" /><param name="flashvars" value="settings=http://vms.slashgear.tv/sgtv/sgtv_embed.php?vkey=0ef399b63a72d0e4ab57" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480" height="298" src="http://vms.slashgear.tv/sgtv/sgtv_player.swf" quality="high" flashvars="settings=http://vms.slashgear.tv/sgtv/sgtv_embed.php?vkey=0ef399b63a72d0e4ab57" name="SlashGearTV" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object></p><p>With availability starting today in Europe, the TG01 is starting to garner some early reviews. SlashGear attended the London launch and got to play around with a couple of demo units. Hit the link for their impressions and a pretty extensive photo gallery.</p>

[whydidnt]

It is a bit concerning that this the second review that indicates that it doesn't appear that the 1 Ghz processor is making a huge difference in performance (Engadget's was the other). What is the bottleneck? Is there something inherent to the WM architecture that is causing a slow down? I'm wondering about video and touch screen drivers as well.

I would have expected this device to provide very high end performance without delay's in screen rotation, etc.

[Jason Dunn]

I would have expected this device to provide very high end performance without delay's in screen rotation, etc.

Ditto. I'm quite shocked to see such sluggish performance with so much firepower...

[gmontem]

What power mode was the device running in? Auto? Performance? Battery?

[Gerard]

Performance aside (and that's a bit hard to ignore, with such an annoyingly lengthy delay for simple screen rotation - something which takes considerably less time to do with my 200MHz HTC Elfin!), I hope there's some way to disable that automatic rotation stuff on the fly, without digging 7 or 8 layers deep into some menu. Maybe map a shortcut to toggle it? 'Cause that looks really annoying if you are not wanting everything to turn dark and wait for a few seconds every time you happen to turn the device. And it'd make me want to chuck it at a wall if it insisted on flipping when I was reading an ebook in bed, for instance, in landscape mode... then turned from my back onto my side and suddenly, presto, it's in portrait mode and ubook is re-paginating to compensate for the differing font space. That gravity sensing stuff is slick, in the right place, but I do not want it dominating my experience of the device. Especially if it's going to steal a few seconds

I don't know if it was because the woman demonstrating stuff had silly long fingernails or what, but the screen seemed rather unresponsive to a lot of touches. Doubt there was a screen protector in place, which is something I'd of course be using. So another concern for me would be that they've somehow messed up on screen sensitivity, or perhaps it's just requiring that taps/swipes be targeted more accurately than she was doing.

[Fritzly]

I wonder why it is so slow; I watched another presentation of the TG01here:

http://www.telefonino.net/Toshiba/Notizie/n21885/anteprima-toshiba-tg01-telefonino-net.html

and the phone is much more responsive. What is also very interesting is that in the second part of the test they use another TG01 with WM 6.5.