WinMo Smart Phones, Ultra-Big Screens

11. Pretty Dumb or Pretty Smart?

Toshiba TG01 vs. HTC Touch Pro2. With huge screens and tons of features, these phones seem like they've got it all. But are they also brainy?

The size and the specs make you expect the TG01 to be a sleek but powerful phone, but at the moment, that’s not quite what you get out of the box. The stripe interface doesn’t seem to take advantage of the Snapdragon processor—the stripes spin slowly; the gadgets you select open slowly; and everything seems sluggish. Switch to the standard Windows Mobile Start menu and the built-in apps like Mobile Office and the speedy processor really shines as Mobile Word, Excel, and OneNote fly open and you can speed through the longest address book. The big-screen on the TG01 really delivers when you’re watching video, but quality was disappointing on some clips, given the processor speed.

So what’s going on?

Switch the TG01 from power-saving to high-performance mode and the stripe interface moves a lot faster. Gadgets still load slowly, but this now looks like a badly-chosen effect rather than a performance issue. You also need to learn to press more firmly than you expect on the touch screen (and HTC’s much better performance proves this is an issue with the TG01). This improves the interface, but it doesn’t rescue it. Skip the Toshiba UI and you get a much better experience with the TG01, although you may prefer a third-party interface to the basic Windows Mobile Today screen. Windows 6.5 will be a much better match for the TG01 and Toshiba says the OS will become available as a free update later this year.

Battery life is also a little disappointing; keeping the TG01 so thin and light means it only has a 1000mAh battery, which is smaller than most other smart phones around. With the big screen to power, you might to get a full day of use including a few sessions of video watching and Web browsing, but you're going to have to plug in by the end of the day.

On paper, the TG01 ought to be twice as fast as the HTC Touch Pro2, which has a 528 MHz processor. However, it doesn’t feel any faster, and between the unusual interface and the occasionally unresponsive touch screen, it can take you longer to get things done. The Touch Pro2 is a much more mature phone (and we don't just mean the knockout business-calling features)–the touch screen is easier to use, whether you’re tapping or swiping; the keyboard adds bulk, but is also the best keyboard you can get on a Windows Mobile phone; and the once-maligned TouchFLO 3D interface now looks friendly and intuitive.

The Touch Pro2 matches or beats the TG01 on everything apart from screen size and slenderness, while the larger size makes room for a bigger battery that easily lasts a day, even when browsing and watching videos. You won’t get Internet Explorer Mobile 6 until a Windows Mobile 6.5 upgrade becomes available, but instead you get the popular Opera browser and you can always install the powerful Skyfire browser (which supports Flash, Silverlight, and PDF files). You can add the CorePlayer software to play the same range of video files (and there are free alternatives, too). The only thing you can’t add is the slightly larger screen that the TG01 offers, which does make a difference.

The TG01 is stylish, but slightly disappointing. The Touch Pro2 is stylish and sturdy, beautifully engineered, and it really delivers, on both consumer and business features–you can’t call it a lightweight, in any sense.