*NEGA REVIEW!*

With such a fusion of epic nastiness, you would also expect the phone to be a sod load of puck, and it is! The touch sensitivity is appalling, absolutely atrocious. I have used this sad excuse for a touch phone and I could not initiate any precision touch sensitivity at all. You would have better luck persuading a Lion to be a vegetarian. You need to press down with your entire finger tip end in order for the phone's screen to register the touch, before detecting the vague direction you wish to move the cursor/item/screen. The speaker where you place it on your ear to hear the warblings of the person of the other end is of a quality that is totally unacceptable by the standards for today's fast paced lifestyle. You put it to your ear expecting the audio to be crisp and clear, but what do you get? You get a mumbled load of puck. Honestly, when you are out and time is of the essence, you do not need to ask the person to repeat what they just said for the fiftieth time because you misheard the last sentence. Good luck guessing what they wanted to say. The volume of the audible noise heard from the speaker is too low. I cannot set it high enough when on loudspeaker to hear the person clear enough to maintain a conversation, and when I do hear them, they cannot hear me due to the echoing feedback which endlessly plagues this device like a hernia to a sportsman.

Does filming video with this camera sound like a good idea to you? Don't bother, because this phone can only film at 320 x 240 with very bad frame clipping if you move quickly. There are a million artefacts in the video, making it no good for video recording. Gadget conscious people, such as me, will see that as a challenge and will try out the other settings to see if we can get better quality video. But that is the equivalent of wiping your ass with the same piece of toilet paper. It just gets shittier and shittier.

The signal strength is just totally random ALL the time. I cannot understand why if I am travelling in a lift that my work colleague has 3 bars of signal on his gawd-awful Nokia 3210, whereas my brand spanking new sparkly Samsung 'Touch my screen with your fat finger' Tocco would have no service at all. I have tested my SIM card in his phone and it is completely fine, resulting with my scientifically approached experiment concluding that it is the Tocco which is flawed with a weak little antenna. There was not even the slightest blip on my Tocco phone's signal bar as I move the phone around to get a good signal for a text message to send out properly.

This phone is prone to the random epileptic seizure now and again. For no apparent reason, the interface slows down to a crawl and then worst case scenario, it freezes, forcing me to take out the battery because the off button doesn't work. At other times, the phone switches itself off for no reason at all; it just decides that you are pressing too many virtual buttons or physical buttons at the same time and restarts to make itself feel better, like Windows 95 after an official update. That to me just says poor electrical engineering and firmware design because they just don't talk the same language when things go awry.

I know it sounds like I am taking apart this phone and ranting at how bad it is, because it is, and that it doesn't have any good sides to it, but the fact is there are a few things I like about the phone. It is light and small so fits in my pocket very well, the photo quality at maximum 5MP is actually not bad and quite comparable to a good stills camera, the battery life is good even if subjected to prolonged video playback, the screen is of a good quality showing good colours, brightness and contrast, the widget on the main screen is fairly helpful and it accepts up to 8GB of micro SDHC memory. But does that little list save this phone from being a large mound of dog dirt? No. Because as a phone, it fails at the most basic of things all phones should be capable of doing in a flawless way. The audible speaker is a desecration upon the ears of its listener. It makes nails on a chalkboard sound like Beethoven and drowning in a sea of wallpaper paste seem like fun. I would rather use plastic cups with a string over hundreds of miles to communicate with the other person. I would rather write my messages down on a piece of paper, fold them up into paper aeroplanes and throw them out on a gentle breeze to reach its destination than attempt any form of communication with this phone. It is a pile of excrement excreted by another pile of excrement, making it the 2nd generation of crap that deserves nothing but total and absolute oblivion of the damned kind where nothing but ash and dust remains. This could just be the phone I bought and everyone else has a version which has NONE of the problems I have faced. But you know what? I think it sucks.