The Toshiba Portege G900 begs to be called cutting edge. With its massive set of features it does manage to deliver on almost all fronts - HSDPA, 3" WVGA touch screen display, spacious QWERTY keyboard, 2 megapixel camera, stereo Bluetooth, fingerprint scanner, Wi-Fi and USB host mode. It does take a heavyweight bloke to handle that much of a feature load, but more than ever PocketPC comes really close to a PC in your pocket.

Key features

3" 65K color TFT touchscreen display with a 800 x 480 pixels WVGA resolution Tri-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support HSDPA 3.6 Mbps with video calls Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional Intel XScale 520 MHz processor 128MB RAM Wi-Fi 802.11b/g miniSD memory card slot with hot-swap capabilities USB host function via miniUSB port 2.5 mm standard audio jack 2 megapixel camera Stereo Bluetooth audio (A2DP) Fingerprint scan feature for security and menu navigation Large QWERTY keyboard

Main disadvantages

Hefty size and weight Slow interface response Poor display legibility under sunlight No FM radio Only 40MB of internal memory available to the user Mediocre camera performance No external reset switch No dedicated graphics chip (at least not officially confirmed) USB host function works only with devices with power consumption under 100mA Poor battery life The Toshiba Portege G900 sure feels excitingly refreshing in a world of Windows Mobile PocketPC dominated by HTC. The high resolution display is keen to impress, while the large keyboard makes typing a piece of cake. Join us on this preview of all the wonderful possibilities that come with Windows Mobile 6 and Toshiba Portege G900. Be right back after the jump.

Stable construction, ungainly looks

The Toshiba Portege G900 measures 119 x 61 x 21.5 mm and weighs a good 198 g. Just to give you a size perspective, the highly popular back in its day Qtek 9100 (and its derivatives i-mate K-JAM, O2 XDA mini S, T-Mobile MDA Vario) measures 109 x 58 x 23 mm. That makes the G900 almost identical in size, save for the extra centimeter of height. Of course it also weighs 30 g more. Yet, compared to feature phones, the size and weight are monstrous. Above the display you will find a status LED, a programmable key, which is initially set to open the web browser, and the secondary video-call camera. The earpiece is there, too. The D-pad at the bottom of the front panel includes the Start menu key, the OK key, the Send and End keys and the two softkeys. There are also two programmable keys that are originally set to open Contacts and Messaging. The round navigation key is centrally located on the D-pad. All the keys are nice and tactile, offering firm feedback when pressed. The left side of the device hosts the 2.5 mm audio jack and the miniSD memory card slot. The On/Off key at the top of the G900 is also used for entering and exiting standby mode. Switching to and from standby mode is actually a full-time job for PocketPC owners. Unfortunately, user feedback claims one of the most serious bugs of G900 is the occasional lockups in standby mode. The only way to get the device back in operation is by restarting it. We didn't experience such a fault during our test, but if you do, you would have to open the battery cover to restart it, because there is no external restart switch (what were they thinking?). The stylus is hidden in the bottom right corner of the device. The right-hand side of the Toshiba G900 hosts the camera shutter key and the volume rocker. A certain downside we found with the camera key is that it seems to take forever to start the camera - you have to hold it down for several seconds. In terms of looks, the Toshiba Portege G900 is nowhere near an eye-catcher. The back panel looks really cheap. Removing it however is easy as pie. Under the "hood" the Toshiba G900 hides a 1320 mAh Li-Ion battery that is supposed to power the handset for up to 320 hours in stand-by mode and up to 380 minutes of talking. These are rather wishful figures really. The large screen (Wi-Fi takes its toll, too) must be draining the battery darn fast. Our test unit had to be recharged every day or so. We did complain already with the Toshiba G900 lacking an external reset switch. Now, every PocketPC out there has one nestled into a pinhole that allows pressing it with the stylus only. For some unknown reason, with the G900 you have to remove the battery cover in order to reset the device (again, you need the stylus). The Toshiba G900 is anything else but pocketable. It's a really large device, but having that ample display really makes a difference.

Keypad means business

The Toshiba G900 has a really great hardware QWERTY keyboard. Since the large display dictated the need of an ample body, the keyboard also takes advantage of this spaciousness. The result is large keys with enough headroom to make typing comfortable. The tactile feedback and responsiveness are first rate. We were also delighted with the keyboard backlighting. The white color is great for working in the dark. The only problem we found with it is that the backlight time was really short. Of course, that's fixable through a simple registry tweak. The Toshiba G900 display is probably this PocketPC's highest advantage. The amazing 3" diagonal and the stunning WVGA (800 x 480) resolution are not a common feature in current PocketPCs with an integrated GSM phone. However, we found three usability downsides of the display that are worth noting - it is a real fingerprint magnet and it does perform really badly under direct sunlight. PocketPCs by HTC usually come with transreflective TFT displays that do way better in bright light, so we were rather turned down by this disadvantage. And finally, the last problem with it is that the high resolution makes the system font rather small and you really have to adjust it using software means. There has been a lot of agitation in the mobile community over the 65K color (16-bit) TFT displays used in PocketPC, while some smartphones already pump up 65 million (24-bit) colors (you didn't hear us say Nokia, did you?). We've never found the regular PocketPC color palette inadequate, so we really think having 65K colors is just enough. There are some manufacturers such as HP and Giga-byte that are putting 256K color (18-bit) displays in their units but that's a mere marketing trick. The LCD panels they are using are indeed 256K color, but they do not use the full color potential and are instead displaying only 65K colors. A simple test that you can do on your PC screen is just to open up a 24-bit photo and preview it with a 16-bit color depth setting. You won't see much difference, we assure you. The only visible difference will show up in 2 color gradients for example. Regular photos will look just as good at 16-bit color depth as they would at 24-bit one. With the CPU being 32-bit, the most efficient way of drawing pixels is by filling them with either 16 or 32 bits of information, meaning that it's either 65K colors or 16M colors that's most effective for the CPU. However, at 32-bit setting having twice the bits means twice the work for the CPU and hence, video and gaming performance slows down. So, with mobile devices, it's essentially a balance between performance and visuals. It's just early for the ultra portable computing to take the step to 16M colors.

Windows Mobile goes 6.0

When we first saw the G900 back in February 2007 at the 3GSM World Congress it was a more than promising prototype - WM6 was just announced and developers hadn't been able to adjust it to the unusual resolution of 800 x 480 pixels. Now obviously the problem has been solved and the screen looks great. The user interface seems to be making good use of the screen real estate and the large resolution (unlike HTC Advantage X7500). This latest version of Windows Mobile doesn't bring the groundbreaking changes it was believed to, back in the day. There are a lot of usability issues inherent to the operation system that still need addressing, but obviously we'll have to wait for 7.0 to do that one day. The OS has been around enough for everyone interested in Pocket PC to have become familiar with it. To start with, all Windows Mobile devices are pretty much the same software-wise. Essentially, any PocketPC is just a software platform which you can expand according to your needs - there are so many applications out there and it's a growing business. So we acknowledge that any current PocketPC user would hardly need a review of the default Windows Mobile applications that come preinstalled with the device - they are always the same. Anyways, we'll still give you something on the software part - for people new to PocketPC, as well as for those interested in what they get straight out of the box when buying the Toshiba G900. The first thing you'll notice when you power up the Toshiba G900 is the standard Windows Mobile Today screen. It shows info about the time and date, connectivity features, and pending messages, tasks and appointments. It's totally customizable - you can strip it bare or you can add new third-party plug-ins Now, for those of you that are not familiar with PocketPC, we should probably explain that those devices have no "main menu" the way feature phones or Symbian S60 devices do. Instead, here you have the Programs menu and the Settings menu - they are almost all you need to access the PocketPC features. They are both accessible through the Start menu which, unlike the one in the desktop Windows, is a user configurable list of shortcuts to some applications. Again, unlike the desktop Windows, the Today screen is not necessarily a place for your applications - instead you usually use the Start menu to access them. The Comm Manager (short for Communication Manager) is where you turn all the connectivity features on or off, such as Bluetooth, WLAN, Bluetooth, and Flight mode. Windows Mobile 6.0 offers full multi-tasking to the extent that it makes it quite hard to shut down open applications. The OS is designed in such a way that it should remain fast and stable without having to close running applications. Those of you with longer experience with this OS however, will surely agree that it does not always work this way, especially in the case of particularly heavy applications when the available memory seems to drain rather fast. The Task manager for the currently running processes is hidden deep in the Settings menu, so you'd be better off installing a third-party application that allows quick access. Windows Mobile traditionally offers customization through themes but they only change the color scheme. You can of course change the wallpaper on the Home screen too, but that's pretty much all you get. In order to apply some more advanced customization, you would need a third party skinning application. Those kinds of applications however usually eat up your RAM.

Contacts and messaging

The Windows Mobile OS has an unlimited contact list with a plethora of available fields for each entry. Synchronization with MS Outlook is textbook. Unfortunately, there is no letter-by-letter search available in the phonebook so you're left with using the alphabetic filtering or scrolling all the way through the list. Sending and receiving messages is done through the centralized Inbox. It has separate folders for SMS, MMS and email. SMS length is virtually unlimited, as well as the memory available for received and sent messages. Inside the multimedia editor you will find the useful option to create multi-page messages containing more than one melody, image or text. The Outlook Mobile email client supports POP3 and IMAP accounts. You can have multiple accounts and you can set the client to do automatic checks in regular time intervals. It has full support for sending and receiving attachments. There is also support for Direct Push. What it means is, instead of checking mail at regular intervals, your messages are delivered to you immediately once they are received by the mail server. The only condition is that your company's Microsoft Exchange server supports Direct Push. Windows Mobile 6.0 offers some upgrades to the email client in comparison to Windows Mobile 5.0 - now you have integrated search, plus support for HTML emails. There are several text input methods with the Toshiba G900, the hardware QWERTY keyboard being the most obvious one. Beside it, there is also handwriting recognition and a virtual keyboard that you can tap on with the stylus. The Block Recognizer allows handwriting with single-stroke gestures, so you have to learn how to write that way (writing is done in a special box). The Letter Recognizer offers a more natural way to write, as you can input normal characters (writing again is done in a special box). With Transcriber you can write wherever you want on the screen in whatever style you may wish. With every text input method you can rely on the Xt9 word prediction system to assist you. However, it's somewhat buggy and it's hard to turn off. If you turn it off and then restart the handset, it will be back on. It also sets itself on at really inappropriate places too, such as the "To:" line in email and MMS. We, along with a long list of disgruntled G900 users, would have really appreciated an option for turning the Xt9 system completely off (need to resort to registry tweaking again).

Managing your files

The built-in file manager of the Toshiba G900 is the standard Windows Mobile variety. It does a nice job finding the multimedia files you are looking for. The file manager can create new folders, copy and move files, set tracks as ringtones or simply send files to other devices. The Picture gallery of Windows Mobile is an application called Pictures&Videos and, as the name implies, you use it to browse the multimedia files in question. As far as pictures are concerned, you can zoom in and out, as well as preview them in landscape mode. The files are shown as either thumbnails or as a plain list. There's a shortcut that allows you to turn on the camera directly from this application. You can even do some basic editing on the images. The primary multimedia player of all Windows Mobile devices is the preinstalled Windows Media Player. Besides music, it allows watching video and streaming TV. You can sort tracks by artist, album or genre and you can create custom playlists. We installed a TCPMP player and the needed codecs to play DivX and XviD video files. Thanks to its powerful processor, the Toshiba G900 was able to smoothly play video at near-VGA resolution at 900 kbps and 25 fps.

Camera: for the sake of having one!

PocketPC are probably bottom of the ladder when it comes to camera performance. It's not about the megapixel count. It's just that their photos are really nothing to speak of. The Toshiba G900 stays on the same path. As you probably imagine, the 3" TFT display is a really nice camera viewfinder to have - but that's pretty much all that's interesting about it. A not so common setting is to choose whether the camera interface should run in landscape or portrait mode. The camera setup menu is hard to operate with fingers only. There is no white balance setting. You can however apply several color effects (Grayscale, Sepia, Cool, Negative), adjust flicker, color and saturation, and use the special camera modes such as Timer and Burst (2, 4 or 6 shots). Should you choose, you can also use the front video-call camera to take pictures and video. The Toshiba G900 camera captures MPEG4 video (or 3GP) in QVGA resolution (320x240 pixels). The available settings here are much the same as the ones in the still camera.

The USB is your host tonight

Connectivity is what matters most when it comes to PocketPCs - both wired and wireless. The Toshiba G900 has enough to show in that department. Direct USB connectivity allows synchronization with MS Outlook. However you can also use Bluetooth 2.0 for that purpose. The Bluetooth capabilities of the device also feature the A2DP profile for stereo listening to music on wireless headphones. Speaking of wireless communication, we should mention there is no Infrared port (no big deal really!), but you have Wi-Fi at your disposal. You can also relay on UMTS support plus HSDPA 3.6 Mbps. There are also GPRS and EDGE, so you always have data connectivity options available. The Toshiba G900 can be used in USB mass storage mode, allowing direct access to the memory card as if it's a memory card reader (no need to tweak things here). Now, another highly intriguing feature of the G900 is the USB host function. That means your PocketPC can act as a host device for USB peripherals. The USB host cable comes enclosed in the retail package. The possibilities are plenty here, but for one limitation - the USB peripheral device you are connecting should have <> Anyway, users have reported that they have successfully managed to hook up USB flash drives (up to 16GB), USB memory card readers (with memory cards), and digital cameras. Some even succeeded connecting 320GB USB hard drives (with external power supply though). Probably the most interesting of all experiments is plugging in a USB mouse (and actually using it). The first no-go is obviously the lack of native mouse cursor drivers in the Windows Mobile OS - the mouse seems to be working and you can even click on the Start menu, but there is no visible cursor feedback. After a short search of specialized sources (www.modaco.com and www.xda.developers.com), it turned out that a hack (read: custom made mouse driver) used for displaying the mouse pointer on the HTC Athena can really be applied in our case too. We didn't have time to test it, but numerous G900 users report it to be a successful mod - the USB mouse with a pointer works like a charm on the G900. To conclude the matter however, we should point out that the USB host function is a bit dodgy and getting your USB gear running on the Toshiba G900 isn't 100% fail-safe.

Surfing around with… Opera

The G900 comes with the Internet Explorer Mobile web browser. It falls behind most of the third-party browsers out there and probably this is the reason why Toshiba ships this device with an alternative web browser preinstalled - the Opera Mini. The Internet Explorer has several view options. You can have it fit the text to the screen, show everything in one column or show the website as it is. Landscape mode and fullscreen mode are also available. Probably the greatest appeal of the high-res screen is the ability to comfortably browse web pages or work on Office documents. However none of the zoom levels of the Internet Explorer Mobile were able to satisfy us. To fit the whole page you need to zoom out which makes the web text unreadable, while if you zoom in you have to use the vertical and horizontal scrollbar a lot (which by the way are pretty tiny and require stylus).

Your mobile office

Windows Mobile offers several time-management features and all of them are easily syncable with MS Outlook. The Calendar is improved in comparison to the one used in Windows Mobile 5, as now it allows searching for events to come. It offers daily, weekly and monthly view. You can have the week start on either Monday or Sunday. You can also hide weekends form the Calendar if you use it for business purposes only. The To-Do list allows you to add tasks and assign them priority. The Notes also come in handy, as you can either type or handwrite directly on the screen. The Voice recorder files also get saved to the notes folder. The Alarm clock has three alarm slots. Each Alarm can have its own repeat pattern. As a frequently used feature, Microsoft should have put more effort into making the alarm clock easily accessible. Instead, it's buried deep down in the Settings menu. Alongside, you will also find the dual-zone clock. The Calculator is another well-known application (as ugly as it gets), which is among the few things in Windows Mobile intended for stylus-free usage. Among the other interesting applications that come with the Toshiba G900 are the Office Mobile, the Picsel Viewer, the ZIP manager, the Windows Live service, the Search application, the TIPtalk and, finally, the Fingerprint Launcher. The Office Mobile features support for viewing and editing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint office files. The Picsel Viewer 1.0 is a universal tool that opens various types of files. It can open Adobe PDF files and it works really fast - at least several times faster than on UIQ smartphones for example. The Search application is quite useful, as it searches throughout the whole file system and applications. You can set filters, so that the application searches only in places you need. Windows Mobile 6 integrates Windows Live, which replaces the MSN search and messenger, which we know from previous versions. You can also download the application Live Search for free, that works great with or without Bluetooth GPS receiver. With it you can find information on local businesses, restaurants, places of interest and even gas prices (the service is currently available only to US and UK). It has nice support for speaker-independent voice recognition that you can use to do your searches. The TIPtalk is an application preinstalled by Toshiba to allow you to make VoIP phone calls. The Fingerprint Launcher is an intriguing application of the Toshiba G900. It makes use of the integrated fingerprint scanner. Besides security, which is the obvious application of the scanner, it also gives you the option to control your device with the scanner. Sliding your finger across it will scroll the interface plus you can set it to start an application of your choice depending on which of the ten (usually!) fingers you touch it with. In order to set that feature you have to slide each finger through the scanner three times. Our test unit hanged each time we tried that exercise so finally, we let it go. A Windows Mobile device is a rather versatile gaming platform thanks to the widely-available third-party games. Beside Java, you also get the games developed natively for Windows Mobile. However, manufacturers usually go the more conservative route and ship their devices with only the default Windows Mobile games: Bubble Breaker and Solitaire, none of which is that amusing. When it comes to games the Toshiba G900 has a really serious flaw - most of the games tested in the community (including some applications, too) cannot make use of the front hardware keys under the display. Users have failed remapping those keys to control games and applications - it has something to do with the G900 hardware key setup.

Final words

The Toshiba G900 packs in some nice technical specs, the 3-inch WVGA display and comfortable hardware keyboard probably the highlights of it all. However, we found one too many disadvantages to recommend it wholeheartedly. It has somewhat slow performance, despite the 520 MHz processor (maybe because there is no integrated graphics chip), it's highly unpocketable and has cheapish looks, the battery life was a letdown, and the USB host and fingerprint scan functionality are dodgy. Even the display has its drawbacks, as it's hardly legible under direct sunlight. On top of all that, the official launch of the Toshiba Portege G900 was plagued by the numerous bugs that were later on remedied by a software update. Still, some of those remained and G900 users are impatiently waiting for the next update. Of course, not all devices are affected so, generally, if you are off buying one you should most definitely look for devices that come with the latest ROM available. More information on that can be found on G900 online user communities. Pay them a visit before you head to the store.