Samsung Genio Touch review

Look along the shelves of your average high street phone shop and you’ll see many a touchscreen phone, but it’s still likely that a good proportion of them are in the ‘contract’ section – where you’ll probably end up having to fork out least at least £25 a month for the privilege of calling yourself a touchscreen owner.

There are aberrations of course, like the good old LG Cookie and Samsung Tocco, now available for next to nothing on pre-pay. However, they are getting a little long in the tooth these days, so it’s good to see another contender like the Genio Touch step up to the plate.

Unlike most other budget touchscreen phones out there, the Samsung Genio Touch has the smaller form factor of a feature phone – it just doesn’t have the keypad where you’d normally expect it to be. Instead, there’s a 2.8-inch touchscreen.

We were surprised to find out that the Genio Touch actually uses a capacitive touchscreen too. If you’re not fully up-to-date with touchscreen technology, capacitive touchscreens rely on sensing the distortions created within the screen’s electrostatic field – caused by the mere presence of your finger. On the other side, resistive touchscreens works on a much more digestible pressure basis – you press, it feels that you’re pressing.

While the latter may sound simpler, it’s the former that leads to more responsive screens. However, capacitive touchscreens are normally only found on much more expensive phones, so we weren't expecting  to see one on the Genio Touch when it’s one of the cheapest phones out there.

Having this more sensitive screen in tow pays dividends. Although it’s nowhere near as sensitive as an iPhone screen or that of a similar high-end capacitive phone, light touches are still all that’s required, making typing on the Genio Touch pleasingly painless.

We should note however that there’s no virtual Qwerty in the Genio Touch. It’s probably a good idea to leave one out since the 2.8-inch screen is quite small in touchscren terms. Instead, you’re left with the sort of number-based keypad control you’d get on a phone with physical buttons.

While this firmly hammers a few nails into the coffin of the idea that the Genio Touch is anywhere near approaching real smartphone-like capabilities, it’s remarkably comfy for texting. There’s default haptic feedback at each key press too, which is a handy replacement for the sensation of pressing a button. Still, if you’re after a device to send long emails on, you should probably look elsewhere.

The home screen interface can pull off a much more convincing smartphone impersonation though. You’ve got three pages to play with, which you can scroll through with a swipe of the finger, and each can be filled with Widgets to your heart’s content. This is the basis of the TouchWiz interface, already used on a handful of Samsung devices. There’s even a Widget to let you download more Widgets.

Each page can hold at least two Widgets, but if you try to swipe to the next page over the top of a Widget, it’ll just move that Widget instead of scrolling. It’s the one part of this interface that lets the Genio Touch down, because otherwise it’s a half-decent impression of the Android operating system. That may sound like feint praise, but show us an Android device that’s available for under £80 on pre-pay.

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