Samsung Tocco Ultra S8300 review

The organiser comprises of a calendar, memo taker, task reminder, world clock, calculator and currency converter. In the applications menu there's also a timer, stopwatch and RSS reader, and bar the latter being slightly fiddly, these all work reasonably well.

Calendar

For instance, the calendar allows you to do the normal amount of functions, such as scheduling tasks, meetings and appointments, and also allows you to register holiday time so you're not disturbed at the wrong moment.

As mentioned, the rest of the applications work well and there's a good range for everyday life. The RSS reader only becomes a slight pain when adding a feed; unless you happen to be on a page that makes finding its feed very easy, there's no automatic detection, so on the whole you need to use a PC to find the link and type it in manually. But after that, the feeds are well displayed and it seems a shame there's no widget to allow you to have the reader on the home screen.

Battery life

We found the Tocco Ultra Edition, which is rated at 4 hours of talk time and over 300 hours of standby, managed to easily make it through 24 hours on a single charge over fairly heavy use. However this was significantly reduced when leaning heavily on the 3G connection; for instance when trying to download the 500-odd emails with Gmail, the battery managed to drop 50% in less than half an hour.

But given that that would be a rare instance most people wouldn't have a problem with this phone's power centre if they charge their phone most nights. It also pleasingly charges quickly through a USB connection, which some phones struggle to do, so that was a nice option should we ever have forgotten the main charger.