Product Reviews

Toshiba's Portégé G900 is the first smartphone we've seen since T-Mobile's Vario II to have a full keyboard that slides out sideways from the screen. The keypad adds some bulk and weight to the handset, but it makes typing easy. We find these keyboards much easier to use than the tiny QWERTY thumb pads that have become popular on a lot of handsets.

The G900's keys are raised in the middle and click when you press them, so you know when you've typed a letter. Special characters and punctuation marks are highlighted in green, and aren't especially easy to see in bright daylight. The main problem with the keypad is that the top row of letters is too close to the screen's edge, so you tend to catch your thumbs on it. The slide doesn't lock shut properly, either, so it tends to wobble around a bit when closed.

The G900 has comprehensive email support. You can connect to POP3 or IMAP4 servers, and the phone supports Push email as long as you can connect to a Microsoft Exchange server with Direct Push enabled. The usual Pocket

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Word and Excel applications are present, which let you view and edit Word and Excel documents, but the handset also has the excellent Picsel Viewer installed. This can view Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files, and lets you zoom out to view the whole document, or zoom in to get more detail.

The G900 has a very impressive screen. Most Windows Mobile smartphones have a display resolution of 320x240 pixels, but the G900's has an incredible 800x480 resolution. This is a huge number of pixels for a 3in screen, and it makes text looks sharp and clear. It also means that there's plenty of room for a number of tasks on the home screen. The high resolution should be ideal for web browsing, but this is where the G900 falls down. Even if you set Pocket Internet Explorer to Desktop mode, which is meant to display pages exactly the same as they appear on your PC, the browser makes a mess of the formatting. We had similar results with the third-party Opera browser.

Logging on to a wireless network is easy with the integrated Wireless Manager, but you'll have to enter your mobile data connection settings manually as the phone doesn't pick them up from the SIM card. The phone has integrated 3G and HSDPA data, so if your network supports it you can surf the web at up to 1.4Mbit/s away from a wireless hotspot. The phone has a front-mounted VGA camera for video calling and a 2-megapixel camera on the rear.

Toshiba's G900 is a competent smartphone with a great screen, but the keypad slide is wobbly and it's let down by the Windows Mobile web browser's poor high-resolution support. We'd recommend T-Mobile's better-built Vario II.