 Toshiba. When you see that name it makes you think of laptops, TVs, DVD players and so on. It doesn’t usually make you think of mobile phones. So I was definitely interested to see how it would fair against the mighty HTC. Before meeting with the Portégé G500 I had never actually used a Toshiba mobile phone before in my life. It’s definitely not the first mobile phone they’ve brought out, but it is the first powered by any version of Windows Mobile.
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OK, let's get the specifications out of the way first:
- Form: Slider
- Dimensions (mm): 96 x 49 x 22.9
- Weight (g): 135
- Band: 2100 for HSPDA category 6 - 900/1800/1900 for GSM/EDGE
- GRPS: Class 10
- Main Display: 65K colours - TFT
- Camera: 2 mega-pixel - Digital zoom - 2.3" - QVA sub camera for Video Telephony
- Video: H.263/MPEG4. WMV
- Sound: MP3, AAC, AAC+. eAAC+, WMA
- Speakers: 1 earpiece - 1 speaker for ringer - Speaker Phone and Music
- Brower: WAP2.0 - XHTML - HTML4.01 - ECMAScript/Opera 8.6
- Memory: 64MB Internal - Support up to 2GB mini SD slot
- Messaging: SMS - MMS - E-mail (Visto/Exchange) - MSN Messenger
- Connectivity: Bluetooth 1.2 (HS,OPP, FTP, DUN) - USB1.1 Client (mini-USB connector)
- Java: MIP2.0. JTWI, JSR 75/135
- PIM/ DRM: Mobile Outlook - ActiveSync - OMA DRM 1.0/2.0
- Fingerprint Authentication
- VoIP: SIP over Wi-FI
- PC Connectivity: Toshiba enhancement
- Platform: Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone
- Battery: Standby time up to - 240 hours (GSM/3G)- Talk time - up to 240 mins (GSM 180 mins (3G)
...and in the box:
- Toshiba PORTÉGÉ G500 Smartphone
- AC adapter
- Battery
- Headset
- CD software and manual
 Toshiba Portege G500 - Box
Overview
 Toshiba Portege G500 - Closed
To look at the phone, it’s pretty much the same as any other slide phone. Just the screen and a few buttons on the front with the numeric keys being shown when you slide it up. It doesn’t weigh very much so you would hardly know that it’s in your pocket. The only physical problem that I had with it is that it’s a little on chunky side, but you get used to it after a while.
 Toshiba Portege G500 - Open
Looking at the front the screen is nice and big. Below it are two soft buttons and then the usual home, back, make and break call buttons with the centre dominated by a round directional button with the select button in the middle. Being of the iPod generation, I found the round directional button a little confusing and kept trying to use it like the iPod scroll wheel but after a while I got used to using it as a standard up/down/left/right controller.
 Toshiba Portege G500 - Rear
On the rear of the phone, with the slider down all you can see is the camera lens, but with the slider up you can see the fingerprint scanner that seems to be the main selling point of this phone.
 Toshiba Portege G500 - Bottom
Finally, on the bottom of the phone (and hidden away which I thought was quite nice) are the mini-USB and the headphones jack.
 Toshiba Portege G500 - Bottom Open  Toshiba Portege G500 - Right Closed  Toshiba Portege G500 - Right Open  Toshiba Portege G500 - Left Closed  Toshiba Portege G500 - Left Open  Toshiba Portege G500 - Top Closed  Toshiba Portege G500 - Top Open
Using the phone
Unfortunately, when you actually get down to using the phone, things go slightly downhill. When performing small tasks like navigating around the phone it seemed to take a while to do anything even when there wasn’t anything else running in the background, and when I started to use things like Internet Explorer it was noticeably slower than other phones I have used.
Sending text messages was also something that I had one or two issues with; to start with I had the T9 dictionary switched on, but when it couldn’t keep up with my lightening fast texting I gave up and changed to the standard text entry. Now, I’ve not used this way of texting for a long time and so was a bit rusty to start with, but it still couldn’t keep up and sending a text definitely became a bit of a chore.
 Toshiba Portege G500 - Front
When it came to making calls, this was the main thing that drove me up the wall. The call quality was shocking. The sound had so much echo I thought that the person on the other end was in a cave, and apparently I was very quiet, even when I had the microphone right up against my mouth. Here's hoping I had a bit of a duffer...
The only blessing with this phone was that it does in fact have 3G capabilities, so at least it wasn’t crawling along at GPRS speeds.
Fingerprint recognition
 Toshiba Portege G500 - Finger Print Sensor
Fingerprint recognition seems to be the major selling point of the phone, which is aimed at businessmen (and women) for whom data and phone security is high on their list of priorities.
There are two uses for the fingerprint reader: security (obviously) and application launching (not so obvious).
Firstly security: It took me quite a while to actually figure out how to set this up, but once I had figured this out, the next stage was to register my fingerprint. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Push your finger too hard and your fingerprint is slightly squished. Don’t push it hard enough and it doesn’t register. Move it too fast and it won’t register. Having not really used fingerprint recognition before I don’t know if this is a problem with this one or with most fingerprint readers, but in the end I managed to register one of them and use it to lock and unlock the phone, which worked very nicely.
Application launching: This confused me somewhat. Toshiba have installed an application on the phone that will allow you to launch different applications, depending on which finger you use. The caveat? To get to the application that will allow you to do this, you have to go past all those applications that you want to launch! A better idea would probably be to have this application start when the phone starts up and then sit in the background.
So although the main selling point of the phone is the security that the fingerprint recognition provides, it’s not easy to set up and unless you move your finger over the reader just right, it won’t recognise you.
 Toshiba Portege G500 - Finger Print Selection  Toshiba Portege G500 - Acquiring Finger Print  Toshiba Portege G500 - Acquiring Finger Print Step 1  Toshiba Portege G500 - Acquiring Finger Print Step 2  Toshiba Portege G500 - Finger Print Acquisition Successful
Other applications
Being a Toshiba phone, they threw in a couple of other apps that could be useful as long as you had the right products to go with it.
Firstly was Goldkey. This is an application that uses Toshiba’s version of the Bluetooth protocol so you can have a proximity lock to use with you (Toshiba) notebook. When the phone is close to the laptop it unlocks; move it away and the laptop will lock. Very useful, but I don’t have a Toshiba laptop, so I wasn’t able to test this.
Another Bluetooth-requiring product was Teleport. This enabled you to either control your PC with your phone or (and this one confused me as to why you’d want to do this) control your phone with your PC. The first I could understand. Maybe controlling PowerPoint or a media player, but as I couldn’t connect to my laptop I wasn’t able to experiment.
Finally, the phone also came with Opera pre-installed. I like Opera on mobile phones. I have the Beta version on my Pocket PC. However, for some unknown reason it didn’t like my 3G connection, stating that it couldn’t find it (when IE could) so in the end I gave up and stuck with Pocket IE.
Summary
So you’re a business minded person who likes to know that anyone who gets their greasy hands on your phone can’t look at anything on it. This phone is probably for you. The fingerprint recognition works, although it might take you a few attempts to actually use it, and it quite happily syncs with Exchange servers so you can get your email, to-do list and calendar.
However, if you make a lot of calls, then the sound quality on this phone will probably annoy you. This phone isn’t for you.
Overall, the phone looks and feels nice. It makes calls and allows you to read your emails on the go. However, there are just too many niggling little things that would put me off buying it.
 Toshiba Portege G500
Thanks to eXpansys for the loan of this device, for more information click here.
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