The Toshiba K01 Puts a QWERTY on the TG02
The Japanese consumer electronic giant Toshiba hasn’t created many waves lately after its introduction of the ill-fated HD DVD home video format to compete with Sony’s Blu-Ray in 2007 and then pulling the plug a year later.
It has entered the highly competitive mobile phone industry at about the same time with a set of rather boring products until it flexed its muscles to finally make its presence felt with the TG01 last June. It was the world’s first Snapdragon smartphone on a touchscreen monoblock that also sported one of the largest displays on a smartphone at 4.
1 inches. It took a 2010 Mobile World Congress to confirm its successor in the TG02 with a twin variant sporting a full-QWERTY slider form in the Toshiba K01.
Features Up Close
The K01 gets a full QWERTY keyboard half shell that effectively adds 3 mm to the thickness of its TG02 twin. Its main strength lies in the AMOLED display technology that edges out the TG02. Both have gorgeous 4.1-inch capacitive touchscreens with WideVGA resolution, 64k colors and gravity accelerometer sensors for auto rotate viewing and shake control.
OLED and AMOLED displays require no backlighting that regular LCD screens have and thus get blacker blacks and eat less energy. That should give the K02 a brighter screen and talk times longer than the 5 hours that TG02/01 has for the same 1,000 mAh battery. It’s a curiosity though that Toshiba prefers to be silent on this area during the MWC event. Other that that, the K01 gets the same TG02 features.
The K01 is your basic 3G on the dual band dual band UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA and a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on 2G.
It comes with WiFi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR with A2DP and USB2.0. There’s SatNav functionality from its built-in GPS receiver for A-GPS and QuickGPS.
The same 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon engine used in the TG02/TG01 powers the K01 with the same 512 MB ROM and 256 MB RAM. The usual microSD expandability for up to 32 GB is likewise supported.
You get the same 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera with geo tagging the same 30fpx VGA vide recording. There’s also a front secondary VGA camera to support 3G video calls.
Windows Phone 7 to the Rescue
Out of the box, the Toshiba K01 will be configured with the lackluster Windows Mobile 6.5.3 which Toshiba claims can be upgraded to the more capable Windows Phone 7 Series out soon. Now just how soon that would be is anybody’s guess.
Announced in 2008 and already delayed on its promised 2009 release, the new WinPho7 was demoed at the same MWC and it looks like it got the more heightened anticipation Microsoft had wanted. Finally, this is the Windows platform that can challenge the Android.
And the K02 is sure to benefit from upgrading to one. Its capacitive touchscreen has no native support from its current Windows Mobile OS and the WinPho7 has. Not all current Windows smartphones can be upgraded as only those meeting the WinPho7 minimum requirements presumably can and Toshiba claims the K01 is one of them.
To find out more about the Toshiba K01 pay a visit to moby1. They compare contracts for the Toshiba K01 and many other phones.
