Being a high-end smartphone, you'd expect the Toshiba Portege G910 to come equipped with some serious features. And so it does...but there's just one small problem.

Camera

Toshiba G910 Portege smartphone showing camera The camera is...what's the word I'm looking for?...dreadful! It's only 2 megapixels for a start, which is pretty poor for a smartphone, but it's the poor picture quality and the sheer slowness of it that really lets it down. You use the camera with the G910 open. This is because there's no viewfinder, so you have to use the screen to frame your shot, which of course you can only see when the G910 is open.
 
There's a dedicated camera button on the keyboard, so at least you don't have to press the function key to take a pic, but the screen updates at what must be 3 frames a second. The E90, in contrast, updates in real time, so you can easily see what you're about to take a photo of. With the G910, you move the camera around and it takes an age for the image on screen to catch up with what the camera is actually pointing at. Push the button to take the pic, and again you have to wait until all the ice caps have melted before the picture is actually taken. Worse, as you can see from the pics I shot, the results leave an awful lot to be desired.

Video

I don't know what to say about this. Words fail me about truly dreadful its video playback is. Check out the video below to see for yourself. The one with the birds flying across the lake is one of the 30fps video samples that come with Vista.
 
It plays fine on the E90, the Zinc II and the Atom V (two other Windows Mobile devices that I tested at the same time as the G910). It barely plays at all on the G910. In short, the G910's video playing abilities are entirely unusable.
 
Note to self: get a tripod next time you video yourself using a phone!

Connectivity

The G910 has loads of connectivity options, but using some of them is not a pleasant experience. It's 3G-equipped with HSDPA, and that worked well enough (once I'd figured out that the reason it wasn't connecting was because the phone functionality was switched off! Not something you have to worry about with a smartphone usually!). Getting Wi-Fi to work, however, was irritating beyond belief.
 
I'm not used to Windows Mobile, but I tested the G910 at the same time as a MWg Zinc II and Atom V, both of which are also Windows Mobile devices. Both of these smartphones connected to my WiFi network in seconds without any fuss. The G910 just sits there, uselessly saying "connecting", then adamantly refusing to do so. It doesn't tell you why, it just stops trying to connect. I gave up after a while.

GPS

The G910 comes with an internal GPS device, but no mapping software of any kind. Sure, you can download Google Maps, which should integrate quite nicely with the GPS receiver, but that would require connecting to the Internet, and frankly this device is just so frustrating to use, I really couldn't face trying it!

Performance

For me, a good smartphone needs the following features in order to be effective for day to day use:
  • Good Web browsing
  • Easy navigation through its menus and screens
  • Easy user input
  • Responsive performance.
If a device fails in any of these aspects, it will really start to frustrate you. Unfortunately, the G910 fails in just about all of these aspect! I've already discussed the problems with Web browsing. It fails on easy navigation and user input, too, as the keyboard is too awkward and the touchscreen is simply useless.
 
You have to be so precise in order for the G910 to recognize what you want it to do, that you'll spend hours clicking on the wrong thing, opening up the wrong application all the time by simply clicking on the wrong pixel. The side scroll bars simply don't work, as the G910 doesn't recognize that you're clicking on them, forcing you to use a combination of stylus and keypad just to scroll up and down a page.
 
Worst of all is the responsiveness of the device. I've already discussed how slow it is at Web browsing, but it's not just the Web that's at issue: everything about the G910 is slow - really, really, unusably slow. Whether the Qualcomm MSM7200 Processor, running at 400MHz, is simply too slow for the job, or whether it's some other reason that makes the G910 so slow, I don't know; but ultimately, the poor responsiveness of the device will wear you down, until in the end, your heart sinks every time you think about using the G910. That's not what you want from a £400 shiny gadget!
 
Read the rest of this review:
 

Posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 4:27 pm by Mike Evans
Filed under Uncategorized