Dooba.net

So we got a demo Toshiba G01 at work. Or should I say a friend did, they are looking at graphics drivers and such. The G01 is the first phone to use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz processor. This is basically netbook level power (think Intel Atom) in your phone. Crazy.

The first thing you notice when picking up the phone is the unique size. Its very thin (thinner feeling than an iPhone), but the other 2 dimensions are bigger than any other phone I’ve seen. Its almost like someone took an iPhone and used a rolling pin on it. This might be a problem for people with smaller hands, and I’m not so sure its great for the pocket of your jeans. The other thing is the phone is very light. The body seems solid, and feels nice.

The huge standout here is the screen. Its big. 4.1 inches of goodness. And at 800×480, it looks great. The media player supports DivX and other popular formats, so you will put that screen to good use. Also, supposedly the browser will support Flash. But we’ve heard this before about phones, so that remains to be seen.

The demo unit had WinMo 6.1 along with Toshiba’s custom UI layer. I can’t say I’m a huge fan of WinMo, it just looks old compared to the competition. But no big deal. The thing I didn’t like at all was the Toshiba UI. It was just odd and not intuitive. Like most other smart phones, there are icons in a grid, but then there are 3 colored stripes in the background that divide the screen equally. Swiping left to right (or R to L) makes these three stripes spin, and you realize they are supposed to be three “3D” columns that rotate. Each time you swipe across you spin to a new side of the columns and see new icons. This is kind of weird.

I didn’t see much in the way of other widgets to UI improvements, so hopefully something is going to change before launch.

The real win with this phone is the insane processing power and good battery, but if the UI is lame its not going to matter all that much.