Samsung is singing straight from Nokia’s hymn sheet these days it seems. The Nokia N97 Mini worked as a downsized phone, so the South Korean giant’s decided that the Samsung Tocco will too, and yanked out the 3G connection and five-megapixel camera. But does that just leave the Samsung Tocco Lite as nothing more than a bloated Samsung Genio Touch? Read on and find out in our Samsung Tocco Lite review!

Looking at the Samsung Tocco Lite it’s obvious what Samsung was trying to do. By pulling out as many hardware bobbins as possible, Samsung’s squeezed down the price to just £90 for the handset on pay as you go. What you’re left with is a sparkly silver, incredibly light touchscreen handset with the occasional essential like a respectable 3.2 megapixel camera left inside, and a sharp three-inch screen.

As a result, the Samsung Tocco Lite is a lovely handset to hold, and the landscape on screen QWERTY keyboard is surprisingly easy to fire off SMS messages with, but it does leave things feeling sorely underpowered. There’s no 3G, so web pages take an aeon to load, no Wi-Fi to get around that in hotspots and no GPS to show you exactly where you area – a pity since the splendid Google Maps has been shoved onboard.

And once again, Samsung’s straight up forgotten to put a standard headphone jack on the phone. Want to use your own buds? You’ll have to remember to carry the adaptor around with you wherever you go.

But Samsung’s TouchWhiz software is still adequate for basic tasks like texting, flicking through photos and playing music, and there are plenty of widgets you can slap on one of three homescreens you can slide through, so you can get live information delivered straight to your peepers as soon as you’ve unlocked the Samsung Tocco Lite.

But the Samsung Tocco Lite does little more than the jolly little Genio Touch. It’s bigger too, leaving you with the impression that Samsung’s created a slightly hollow shell of a handset. But at £10 dividing the two phones, it’s not too harsh a decision to make. Want a sharper screen? Plump for the Samsung Tocco Lite. Want a midget mobile that does just the same? Go for the Genio Touch instead. Either way, you’ll end up with a bargain.

Verdict
It’s nice, but hard to see what’s new in the shape, size or specs

Love
Has a better screen than the Samsung Genio Touch

Hate
That’s about the only improvement over the Samsung Genio Touch

The spec
Screen: 400×240, 3 inches
Connectivity: EDGE, Bluetooth
Camera: 3.2MP
Battery life: Talk time: Up to 600mins
Storage: Support for microSD cards
Size: 106 x 53.5 x 11.9 mm