Sometimes, touch screens are great. The iPhone is the obvious first contender in that particular Olympics, closely followed by HTC's recent efforts. Sometimes, you wonder what was the point, like Samsung's crippled F490, which had acres of touch screen and no clue what to do with any of it.

The Tocco falls somewhere between those two stools. While it falls short of the iPhone in terms of responsiveness and flexibility, it certainly feels better and has a superior menu system to the F490.

Tocco is Italian for 'touch' by the way, appropriate perhaps since this is an evolution of Samsung's Armani phone, and the first thing that strikes you is the stylish casing. Solidly built and finished in brushed chrome-style metal and shiny black plastic it's a classy looking device and no mistake, even if you use the replacement battery cover with a flappy fold-over cover for the screen.

On the sides are slots for microSD card (up to 8GB, though none's supplied) and charger/headphones, a volume rocker and camera shutter button. Aside from a screen lock button on the top, that's it, so it's minimally sleek.

The large 262,000-colour 2.8in touch screen dominates the front, with just call start/end and a large action button beneath it and a speaker and a VGA video call camera above it. The screen is really quite beautiful to look at - not so big that it overstates its case (like the iPhone) but not so small that it's a pain to read anything on.

The bright and colourful iconic menus look good too, with some nice 3D animations when you switch between apps, unlike the F490's rather dreary croix system.

So out goes the cross and in come widgets. From the home screen there's a button that adds a vertical Mac-style dock containing a host (there's room for about a dozen) of useful apps which you can personalise to suit yourself. The default version brings up time, calendar, games, music, profiles, pictures and radio.

So far, so 'just another menu'. But the widgets use the Tocco's touch screen to good effect. To scroll through them you brush your thumb up and down the dock and to activate them you drag them out of the dock with your thumb. Once dragged, their icons remain on the main screen until you replace them. You can also move them around and put them where you like, just as you would the icons on your computer's desktop. It's a nice touch (sorry) and helps give the phone a bit of extra personality.

We liked the touch screen, for the most part, but though it was often quite impressively sensitive, it did seem to occasionally lock up on us, and we found the only way to get it flowing again was to hit one of the hard keys at the bottom.

The 5 megapixel camera is quick to get up and running via the shutter button (about three seconds) and offers a good range of photo options including anti-shake, face detection and smile detection. The latter is apparently supposed to stop you from taking a picture unless there's a smile in view. We found it worked occasionally but not enough to make us feel confident enough to rely on it - you're really better off relying on your shutter finger. There is a brief shutter delay though, so the faster your finger the better.

Web browsing is a clunky experience, despite the support for super-fast 7.2Mbps HSDPA, as close as you'll get to broadband at the moment (not that you'll be getting broadband, since there's no Wi-Fi). While it is possible to scroll through pages iPhone-style by rubbing your fingers across them, the screen isn't really sensitive enough to make this an intuitive experience, and you end up pushing too hard to get it to move and activating buttons by accident.

There's no onboard accelerometer either - call us fussy but we're getting used to turning our wide screens on their side and having the images flip over.

There is a zoom option however - you can use the volume rocker button on the side to zoom in or out, or use a more long-winded menu option. You can also opt to display pages in optimised or desktop mode, which breaks the page into different numbered parts which you can then choose to zoom in on. It's better than nothing, but falls way short of the iPhone's pizzazz.

The music player however is pretty good, sorting tracks in the usual way but allowing you to skip to part of a song by rubbing your thumb along the progress bar. You can also skip to the next track by dragging your thumb across the screen. There are shuffle, repeat and rating options plus a graphic equaliser with ten presets, though as usual with these things it has little real effect on the sound.

It comes with a nicer than usual set of earphones too with rubberised noise guards and - oh joy - a 3.5mm adapter for Samsung's power plug, so you can use your own 'phones if you like. There's also an FM radio.

We weren't overly impressed by the battery life but we did manage to get a couple of days of moderate use out of it.

Overall, the Tocco is a decent little touch screen phone with some nice personalisation elements (those widgets) and pretty good camera. It's a shame the browser looks a bit dowdy compared to some of its rivals (and especially since it boasts 7.2Mbps HSDPA) and that there's no accelerometer or Wi-Fi, but if you like to touch and don't fancy an iPhone or a smart phone, it should be top of your list.