It is an elegant and enticing touch screen smart phone; it’s the smartphone working on Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system; it’s the potential rival of Apple's iPhone 3G and the BlackBerry Storm; well, it is TG01 that was announced by Toshiba on Tuesday.

Certainly, Toshiba TG01 smartphone can pep up the battle of smart phones going on between Apple iPhone 3G, HTC Touch HD and BlackBerry Storm.
Windows Mobile 6.1 smartphone, Toshiba TG01 is equipped with the powerful Snapdragon chipset from Qualcomm. Probably having one of the broadest screens, the phone offers a large 4.1-inch WVGA 800 x 480 384k pixel resistive touch-screen. Just 9.9mm (0.38 inches) thick, TG01 is slimmer and smarter than any of its rivals on the market.  

Featuring Toshiba's own 3-D user interface, TG01 boasts of Wi-Fi, 3G HSPA, Bluetooth, GPS and A-GPS connectivity. It offers a microSD card slot that can support up to 32 GB of additional memory. The phone can respond to gestures and shaking for doing tasks, such as answering and ending calls. The phone also offers high-definition video decode, 3-D graphics, a 12-megapixel camera, mobile TV and XGA display support.

The Windows Mobile, TG01 can play music, games, surf web, send instatnt messages, and download emails. It’s an Internet Explorer Mobile 6, featuring Flash support. Its accelerometer helps to rotate the device display to portrait and landscape modes. Its track support facilitates navigation of Web pages. It’ll offer one-click access to YouTube, Facebook, and other Web-based services

Toshiba TG01 is the first smartphone to use Qualcomm's 1GHz Snapdragon QSD2850 chipset that will offer near-laptop speed, minimizing power consumption, which is definitely the most appealing feature of the phone. With the 1-GHz Scorpion microprocessor at core, 128-bit multiple-data capability, and Qualcomm's 600-MHz digital signal processor for multimedia applications, the phone can do wonders.

Toshiba just revealed that TG01 will be available in Europe around summertime, but the company did not say anything about the price and timing for international availability of the phone.