The New Toshiba Portege Handsets Officially Presented

The Italian division of Toshiba recently presented, in Milan, the new Portege handsets announced a few months ago: Toshiba G910 / G920 and Toshiba G710,
plus Toshiba G450 – a USB modem with phone functionality.

It seems that the G920 and G910 names hide the same device, and its naming will differ depending on the market it's launched for. Since in Italy (hence Europe) the handset was just presented as G910, the US will probably get it as G920.

The official specifications for Toshiba G910, as presented in Italy, are: 3 inch touchscreen TFT display with a 480 x 800 pixel resolution, 2 Megapixel camera, 3G/HSPDA, built-in GPS receiver, GPRS, Bluetooth, VoIP (via Wi-Fi), Media Player, Java (MIDP 2.0 and JSR179), Mobile Outlook and ActiveSync. The handset measures 117 x 64 x 19,8 millimeters, weighs 183 grams, packs a full QWERTY keyboard and can offer up to 6 hours of talk-time and up to 460 hours of stand-by time. Toshiba G910 runs on Windows Mobile 6 Professional and will be available in Europe starting April 2008 for a retail price of about 600 Euros ($880).

Toshiba G710 is the second handset from the Portege series that got an official presentation, and it's a compact-form GSM/EDGE smartphone that runs Windows Mobile 6 Standard. The device offers a full QWERTY keypad, GPS receiver, a 2.4 inch TFT display with QVGA resolution, photo camera with 2 Megapixels, stereo Bluetooth and microSD card support for up to 2GB of extended memory. Toshiba G710 measures 115 × 62 x 13 mm, weighs 130 grams and will hit the market in March 2008 for an estimated price of 300 Euros (about $440).

Toshiba G710

Both Toshiba G910/G920 and Toshiba G710 are created mainly for those who need devices with business functionality.

The third Portege device that was unveiled by the Japanese company is Toshiba G450, which is a USB modem, a MP3 player and a mobile phone – all in one case that measures only 98 x 36 x 16 millimeters. The handset supports GSM, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS and HSDPA connectivity, comes with a USB mini interface and can provide 3 hours of talk-time and about 300 hours of stand-by time. The interesting aspects about Toshiba G450 are its unusual rounded design, unusual rounded split-keypad and its more than unusual tiny OLED display with the 96 × 36 pixels resolution.

Toshiba G450

Aside from the interesting aspects about Toshiba G450, there's a strange one too. About a week ago, at the CES 2008, UTStarcom showcased the UTStarcom HSM 180 device which, in my eyes at least, looks exactly the same as the G450 exposed by Toshiba. Moreover, the HSM 180 was presented with the same functions the G450 is said to have, which makes me wonder what in the name of mobility is going on? I searched the web for references regarding the device's resemblance and I haven't found anything except some info on two Russian sites, but they're as confused as I am. I believe many other mobile users will be confused too, so either Toshiba or UTStarcom should say something about the matter.