Toshiba Portege G710

RIM’s BlackBerry was the first smartphone to bring the delights of instant, push email to the business masses and it has been much copied over the years. No manufacturer has taken it quite to the same extreme as Toshiba, however, whose Portégé G710 apes not only the BlackBerry’s slab-style Qwerty keyboard, but also the navigation method.

Sitting directly below the Portégé G710’s screen is a direct copy of BlackBerry's famed clickable-trackball, as first seen on its Pearl. Toshiba hasn't even had the good grace to give it a different colour backlight and as you switch the phone on, you're confronted with a familiar BlackBerry-style cool, white glow.

To be fair though, this is generally a good thing, since it makes navigating Windows Mobile's awkward interface an easier task than with a simple, clickable directional pad. Long lists of contacts are dispatched with ease, for example, but the trackball’s sensitivity could do with a tweak – it takes far too many rolls to move the selection highlight from one item to the next.

The rest of the Portégé G710's design is, arguably, a little easier on the eye than recent BlackBerrys too, though it may be outstripped when the Bold appears later in the year. It's slimmer than the BlackBerry 8820 (13.2mm compared to 14.5mm) and the black soft-touch plastics used for the case make the device nicer to hold as well. Toshiba has even managed to squeeze in a halfway decent keyboard – the keys have a pleasant, positive action and are separated by just enough space to make typing emails a swift and generally painless experience.

The Portégé G710’s headline specifications look reasonable for a phone costing just over £200. The omission of HSDPA at this price point isn’t much of a surprise, but it’s disappointing that Toshiba dropped Wi-Fi for the sake of cost-cutting, too. Still, you do get GPRS and EDGE, as well as GPS. Toshiba doesn’t supply any sat-nav software, but you can add Google Maps for free and make use of its GPS features.

On the software front, it's also good to see that Toshiba has included the full version of Microsoft Office Mobile. This is far from the case with all non-touchscreen Windows Mobile devices do this, though it's worth reiterating that this is the Standard version of the suite which (rather uselessly) doesn't allow you to create new documents from scratch.

Unfortunately, turn on the Portégé G710 and you'll find that all the good ergonomic design and luxuries go out of the window. That shiny GPS bauble masks serious weaknesses in the core specification – the processor is a slow 260MHz, the RAM stingy at 64Mb, and use storage not much better at 128Mb. The result is a smartphone that is seriously sluggish to use – switching from one application to another is frustratingly slow and you’ll find plenty of opportunities to admire the animation of the Windows Mobile hourglass.

In fact the Portégé G710’s performance was so bad that we found ourselves constantly checking Task Manager to see what was going on. All too frequently the phone needed rebooting because it had completely locked up or was taking too long to respond. The lacklustre performance also seemed to have an effect on the speed at which the phone was able to respond to key-presses. When two keys were pressed too closely together, the second frequently failed to register – a frustrating foible that seriously undermines the Portégé G710’s keyboard.

So, the Portégé G710 is hardly what you'd call a snappy performer, but unfortunately, there are more disappointments. The two megapixel camera, for instance, is accompanied with a flash, but this does little to improve its resolutely mediocre image quality. Pictures have an insipidly soft focus and it takes so long to start the camera application that the moment you were trying to capture will probably have long gone by the time you’re ready to shoot it.

Worse than all this, however, is the battery life. Now Windows Mobile devices are notoriously power-hungry and we've rarely seen a device achieve significantly more than two days of normal use. With the lack of HSDPA and Wi-Fi – not to mention the pedestrian processor – we were expecting to see more than average from a single charge of the Portégé G710. Not so.

In extremely light use, we managed to just about eke two days of use out of the Portégé G710’s 1105mAh battery. The battery seemed to be poorly calibrated, too – once the battery meter reaches 25%, it nosedives, but the handset lasts for three or four hours more before it actually conks out.

So, this is all a bit of a shame really, because Toshiba has got the most of the difficult stuff right with the Portégé G710. The keyboard is good and the navigational control excellent (albeit not an original idea). It's also cheap for a phone with GPS at £225, but there are simply too many compromises in the specification to make the Portégé G710 worth recommending – though we have no hesitation in recommending that you avoid it.