Foreword, package contents
Not even a year has passed since Toshiba’s handheld computer department has risen from its ashes, which resulted in the exceptional G900, which received a lot of righteous appraisals at its time. We’ve been happy at that time that there will be new machines coming, which really did happen, but we had to wait a couple of months. The point is that the renowned manufacturer has recently launched new models; the first that got to us is G910, the successor of the previously mentioned model. At first I’d like to say that it looks very, very strange, at first my mind went wild when writing the introduction; the result of this is visible in the framed part to the right, just to make you happy.
The word UFO is commonly used for extraterrestrial spaceships, although it has been originally used in military flight, all unidentified flying objects have been called this way. Aliens have appeared in many places along history, although it’s a fact that the amateur UFO-believers from the last century were those who had the highest influence on people interested in this topic. Still we can bring back lots of incredible stuff from even older times: according to the genesis myth of a West-African tribe, the dogons, there ancestors received their wisdom from aliens called the Nommo, who came from the star Sirius. The strange is that in these legends there are such infos about Sirius that were uncovered by scientists only much later. By the time of the cold war it was already sure that there is no life on other planets in the solar system, but since the opposing forces have created dedicated centers for observing unidentified objects (enemy spy planes), the UFO maniacs have received another boost for their beliefs. And now we have Toshiba G910, which can again turn up interest for aliens, as we can surely say that its exterior design has been brought from the Mars by ET…
Although the newcomer is a Pocket PC with a QWERTY keyboard and WVGA screen, just like its predecessor, they still differ in lots of things. While G900 is a so-called “classic QWERTY PDA”, G910 has a kind of communicator design, meaning that it can be opened, not slided. Such solutions are not very widespread amongst PDAs, momentarily I only remember HTC Universal – but from the smartphones I could mention Asus M930 or Nokia E90.
Hirdetés
The handset, provided by MobilX, came in a mid-sized black box, which had a charger, a data cable, a miniUSB-3.5 mm jack converter and a stereo headset inside besides the phone itself.
External marks
I would like to apologize to our more conservative readers for the picture on the previous page. So Portégé G910 has a very strange design, it is similar to the classic communicators, so it’s quite large, it weighs 183 grams, it’s 19.8 mm thick, so no one will keep this monster in a pocket. The materials used are of a decent quality, and although the plastic parts are good fingerprint-collectors, they are still quite pleasant to touch. There are some leather-like parts to enhance the design; most of the back cover is made of this material, which provides a firm grip for G910 during typing.
The front’s design drew a huge question mark above my head. There is a large surface with a speaker, two LEDs a five-way d-pad, the call accept/reject keys and an incredibly small display. Even Ericsson T10’s “hole” is better than this. We could say that it’s a status display, but no, the OLED screen with two lines can be used for dialing and reading SMS messages too – or at least it could be used, but I say that it’s practically limited to checking the time. I just can’t understand why the manufacturer was saving on this part, as the whole handset would be much more usable if there would be a larger screen on the outside, like in the case of Nokia E90. I have already mentioned the back, fortunately there aren’t many things on it; there is only the camera’s lens in one of the corners – it just couldn’t be in a stupider place, but I will discuss this later.
The power button and the microSD slot are on the top; the latter one needs long nails or some kind of proper tool in order to get the cover off. On the right there is the fingerprint reader, the volume control keys and the audio output, in which we can plug the 3.5 mm jack converter. They could have used a standard output, but it’s still not bad.
On the opposite site there is the opening mechanics and on the bottom there is the miniUSB connector with the magical Qualcomm 3G CDMA label on its right. The stylus is hidden on the side of the openable part, its thickness is like of a toothpick, but it’s made of a very hard material, so it seems very durable – it’s just uncomfortable.
Upon opening the machine we get to see a totally different thing. G910’s keyboard is high-tech and conservative at the same time, it’s evident that it’s well thought-out. In the center of the upper part there is a touchscreen with a 3” diagonal and a 800 x 480 pixels resolution. There is a black part surrounding the screen, with a touch key on each side. In the top right corner we can of course see the secondary camera used for video calls.
On the bottom there is the QWERTY keyboard, the best word to describe it would be “wow”. The keys are large, have a comfortable pressure point, are good to touch, so typing on them is a great experience and they even provide a really fast data entry method. The backlight is blue, I didn’t find this the best choice for the greenish texts, but this is no big deal.
Hardware, speed, data transfer
The operating system is Windows Mobile 6 Professional which runs on a 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7200 CPU, along with 128 MB RAM and 256 MB ROM. There is 49 MB free for running programs and 127 for storing data, this latter one of course can be expanded with a microSD card, the slot is SDHC-compatible.
Now would be the time and place for the speed tests… unfortunately the small ET was no good friend of ours. I understand this partially, VsBenchmark has probably been confused by the screen that works only in 800 x 480, it cannot be rotated. It’s another question why didn’t Pocket PC Mark run; let’s just say that it’s because Anton Tomow’s software is nothing up to date. Knowing these I can only have a subjective opinion about the machine’s speed. Well, it’s medium. We unfortunately have to wait most of the time for screen changes, scrolling is not perfect either, which is probably due to the high-resolution display. Fortunately there were no problems with running applications, at least when they launched.
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The stylus is on the left
The GSM module is tri-banded (900/1800/1900 MHz), but we can use the handset on third generation networks too. The fastest data transfer mode is HSDPA, WiFi is 802.11b/g compatible. There is of course Bluetooth too, version 2.0 and it supports A2DP. There is a built-in GPS receiver, I could find my position with it, speed is medium, but I had no iGO on a microSD card at me at the moment, so I couldn’t test navigation. Anyway, G910 is not the best choice for such things, due to its size.
Programs, phone calls
There is no extra plug-in on the Today screen, not even a quick-launch bar. As a matter of fact there is no need for one, as we can start the basic applications with the touch keys on the two sides of the screen, or we can use the fingerprint reader. This one, I think, isn’t a very efficient way of launching applications, as we first have to bring up the Fingerprint Launcher in order to be able to do anything else. The reader works fine, by the way, it doesn’t really miss, but it is in a very strange place, we have to keep the phone in a weird way in our hands in order to use it.
There are some nice things in the menu. There is an app that converts picture to text; it can be used for name cards but separate text digitalization too and it can even use pictures stored on the phone. It’s effectiveness is questionable, it just couldn’t do anything with Hungarian text, but it might be somewhat better with English.
The Opera Mobile browser is rather special, version 8.65 is installed. Although the Office pack is included too, the manufacturer also installed Picsel Viewer. There are no extras in the settings, but I have to mention again that we cannot rotate the phone’s screen, which might cause software incompatibility issues.
Making phone calls is a very uncomfortable process with the phone. We have to close it to talk, but to dial it has to be opened, as we can only enter numbers on the small external screen with the d-pad, it’s horrible. So this is how a call is made: we open the phone, go to Outlook, choose a number, press the dial key, quickly close the phone, then talk. Sound quality isn’t the best either, my partners were complaining about not hearing me very well. The bonus fun part is that G910 turned off by itself sometimes after calls. Software related to phone calls are all factory defaults, which is no downside at this platform, messaging and the address book are all okay.
Multimedia
The camera is a 2 megapixel one with autofocus and there is a LED flash to help it function in poor lighting conditions. Taking picture is a real experience… the problem is that the display and the camera are not parallel with each other; there is about 20 grades difference between them. On the other hand the camera gets to the lower right corner when taking pictures, and every normal man would hold the phone there, but it’s impossible. The third thing is that there is no real exposure button with three states, so focusing is a strange thing, I usually pressed the button mindlessly and waited for the effect.
The highest resolution available for images is 1600 x 1200 and 320 x 240 pixels for videos. Picture quality is terrible, there are practically no colors, the dynamics range doesn’t even exist, and darkness noise is very high. I didn’t even mention that focusing, and the whole process of taking a picture takes so much time that we could shoot at least three pictures with a normal phone during that. The software doesn’t have many settings, we can set the image size, JPEG compression amount, white balance and there are some effects as a bonus.
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The handset isn’t too bright in music either, as there is only Windows Media Player for playback software, which is quite limited in functionality. Sound quality is rather good through the speakers, G910 doesn’t distort even on the highest volume level (it’s not too loud, though). The headset has quite an amount of boominess, it depends on the personal taste if one will like it, I would change it if I would have a G910.
Battery, summary
The battery has a capacity of 1320 mAh and it’s changeable. The high resolution screen requires lots of power, the handset has to be charged daily with an average use.
Summary: after reading the review probably everyone has figured out that I don’t like G910 too much. It has a strange design, I couldn’t use it, but a group of people who are used to communicators will probably be happy about the new design, as there hasn’t really been something like this in the world of Pocket PCs. The handset is very powerful by the specifications, it has data transfer features too, but in some places the foolishness is just simply striking, not even mentioning the huge flaw that it turn off by itself sometimes after calls – we can only hope that a software update will fix this, not too small, bug. The display is nice, but it eats a lot of energy – everyone should decide what’s more important. There is no award.
Bocha
Translated by Szaszati
The handset has been provided by MobilX.
The phone can be bought online at www.mobilx.hu.
Info line: +36-52-501-868
Specifications
| Toshiba Portégé G910 | ||
 | Technology | Tri-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE (900/1800/1900 MHz) +UMTS/HSDPA (850/1900/2100 MHz) |
| Operating system | Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional | |
| Size | 117 x 64 x 19.8 mm | |
| Weight | 183 grams | |
| CPU | 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7200 | |
| ROM/RAM | 256 / 128 MB (127/ 49 MB free to use) | |
| Display | 3” diagonal, 800 x 480 pixels resolution, 16 bit color depth touchscreen | |
| Expandability | microSD (SDHC-compatible) | |
| WiFi | 802.11b/g | |
| Infra / Bluetooth | present / 2.0 (A2DP too) | |
| GPS receiver | present | |
| Audio | 3.5 mm jack output via converter, microphone, mono speaker | |
| Camera | 2 megapixels, autofocus + secondary camera for video calls | |
| Battery | 1320 mAh changeable Li-Ion | |
| Other | Fingerprint reader, gpsOneXTRA Assistance | |
