Samsung, like most of the major phone manufacturers, has occasionally been guilty of making phones that put style over substance, that look great but don't deliver what their catwalk looks promise.

Fortunately, the Tocco doesn't quite fall into that category. It's certainly got the style thing sorted, following on from Samsung's other touch screen tasties like the Armani and the F490.

It's a petite, minimalist, slimline slab with brushed metal back, shiny metal surround and sleek black plastic on the front, framing that large 2.8in touch screen.

While the screen dominates the front (there are just call start/end and action keys below it, plus a small speaker and video call camera above it) the sides are equally sleek, broken only by slots for microSD memory cards (up to 8GB ones are supported) and charger/headphones, a volume rocker, camera shutter button and a screen lock button on top.

Unusually, it comes with a choice of battery covers. There's the standard shiny one but there's also an odd leatherette affair that wraps itself over the front with a tiny hole for the loudspeaker. It's certainly useful for protecting the screen but since there's nothing to hold the flap in place, so it does tend to, erm, flap about.

Fire it up by pressing any of the three hard keys on the front and the 262,000-colour screen springs into life with a riot of colourful icons.

But these are no ordinary icons, oh no. For this is Samsung's TouchWiz user interface and these are 'widgets'. Widgets in this case are actually application icons which can be pulled out of a Mac-style dock that runs down the left-hand side of the screen.

Place your thumb on one, then drag and drop it from the dock on to the screen and place it where you like. There are ten in all, including date, time, calendar, music, games, gallery, profiles and FM radio

It's all very intuitive and easy, and there are a few nice 3D animations too, though we did find that the screen would occasionally lock up, requiring us to press one of the hard keys to get it going again. We also felt that with such a nice big screen they've missed a trick by not including a QWERTY keyboard, so you'll need to text using a virtual standard numeric keypad and T9.

The 5-megapixel camera does a pretty good job of still snaps in good light. It's fairly quick to wake up by holding the shutter key (slightly under three seconds) and offers a good range of settings including multi-shot (up to 15 rapid-fire shots), anti-shake and face detection (which makes sure the central face in a photo is in focus) plus an LED flash.

There are also a few fun options like mosaic shot, which stitches together several different pics into one, and smile detection, which tries to stop you taking a pic unless it can detect a smile, though it didn't seem terribly reliable to us.

Pics were generally sharp with only some of the usual minor colour balance quibbles that are par for the course with cameraphones.

Video, as is often the case, let the side down a little offering only a rather jerky QVGA (320x240 pixels) resolution. There is however a basic video editing suite which allows you to adjust the resolution of your flicks and add an additional soundtrack.

The music player is a decent one, making good use of the touchscreen by allowing you to skip to part of a track by running your thumb along the progress bar.