Toshiba Portege G900 smartphone

Toshiba isn’t an especially big player in the UK phone market but, if the Portégé G900 is anything to go by, it’s looking to make a splash. It’s a smartphone with a sliding keyboard design much like the HTC TyTN II , but it’s a bit bigger and heavier – and for good reason, too.

The G900 feels solid and well made, but it’s clearly been designed to appeal to the conservative business user rather than the must-have-the-latest-gadget brigade. It closely resembles the HTC TyTN and the case slides apart in the same way, although the two halves are more tightly sprung and less prone to sliding apart when the phone is in a trouser pocket. The sliding mechanism isn’t quite as smooth, though, and tends to stick unless you push the case open with even thumb pressure at each end.

The keyboard is much more finger-friendly than the TyTN’s and, while the keys are closely spaced, their pronounced domed shape and positive action makes for accurate typing. The top row of keys sits very close to the bottom edge of the screen, though, and your fingers tend to bump against this while typing. A small point, to be sure, but an annoying one nonetheless – just like the fact that the lime-green labelling on dual-function keys is hard to read in bright light.

Windows Mobile smartphones have so far stuck with a screen resolution of 240 x 320, but Toshiba has really upped the ante on the G900. Its slightly-bigger-than-normal 3” screen has an enormous 800 x 480 resolution and everything looks ultra-crisp as a result. Windows Mobile 6 doesn’t make the best use of this extra real estate, sadly, and simply treats the screen as a 240 x 320 display. You can at least zoom out in applications and still read everything, but this increased resolution would be better served by a bigger screen.

Pocket Internet Explorer, however, does now have a high-resolution option and this works particularly well when pages are viewed in landscape using the program’s ‘desktop’ mode (which gives the most accurate rendition of the original web page that Pocket IE can manage). The only caveat is that this does tend to make text too small to be completely legible and not all sites respond properly to Pocket IE’s text-size option. The screen is also deeply recessed into the case and, if you’re right-handed, dragging the right-hand scroll bar is trickier than it should be as the stylus tends to scrape against the plastic surround.

Unusually for a smartphone – and perhaps another nod to its intended business audience - the G900 has a built-in fingerprint reader. This is tucked underneath the screen and accessed by sliding open the handset – an arrangement that isn’t particularly convenient if you’re trying to scan a finger while looking at the screen. Fingerprints can be used in lieu of a password for unlocking the handset, as well as launching applications. Scan each finger in turn and you can assign a program to each digit, although it’s debatable whether remembering that your thumb launches Pocket Outlook is simpler than selecting it from the Start menu.

An unlocked Portégé G900 costs around £30 more than the HTC TyTN and has a similar specification, although what you gain in screen resolution you lose in digital camera resolution (2mp to the TyTN’s 3mp). Still, if you want Windows Mobile 6 and a high-resolution screen, the G900 fits the bill.

Toshiba Portégé G900