Pantech Duo Cell Phone Review
By Alfredo Padilla
Reviewed.com Editorial Staff
Published on November 30, 2007
The Pantech Duo is a Windows Mobile smartphone with a cool trick, it slides out in two directions, revealing a regular phone keypad when you slide it up and a QWERTY keyboard when slide to the side. The Duo is a small device, if a little on the thick side, but unfortunately it suffers from poor construction, which gives us concern regarding its durability. The Pantech Duo is currently available from AT&T for $199.99 after a mail-in rebate and with a two-year contract agreement.
Thanks to the regular phone keypad making a call on the Pantech Duo is a straightforward affair, just slide out the keypad and start dialing. As a Windows Mobile device the Duo comes with a complete set of organizer features, including an excellent address book and calendar.
The Pantech Duo did not perform particularly well in our tests of audio quality during a call. The sound received by the phone was adequate, but the sound sent by the phone was exaggerated. Side tone, the small amount of your own voice that is piped back into your ear so you can judge how loud you are speaking, was low on the Duo. This means you may speak too loudly to compensate.
The Pantech Duo sports a 1.3 megapixel camera, which is a little low considering most phones at this price point are starting to sport at least 2 megapixel cameras. The Duo's camera put up poor performances across the board in our tests of image quality, with resolution, color fidelity and noise all significantly below average. The camera interface is also poor, with a very small viewfinder. If you want a phone you can take decent photos with the Duo is not it.
On the multimedia front the Duo uses Windows Media Player Mobile for both video and music playback. This software does a solid job and allows you to easily synchronize the Duo's media with Windows Media Player on your computer. It also supports protected music and video that uses Microsoft's DRM, for example the Napster music store or Amazon's Unboxed video store.
The Duo runs the non-touchscreen version of Windows Mobile, a powerful and flexible phone interface but one that has a rather steep learning curve. The Duo's messaging capabilities are very good, with excellent email support and solid text messaging capabilities. The presence of the QWERTY keyboard will be a boon to heavy typists, we were able to manage an impressive 48 words per minute on it. The Duo has an adequate web browser, better than on most phones but not as good as Safari on the iPhone.
The Pantech Duo had mixed results in our battery life tests. For call time it lasted an adequate 4 hours 20 minutes. This means the Duo will do for most users, but big time talkers may find battery life a little constraining. Music playback time was a little longer at 4 hours 53 minutes, but this is significantly shorter than most phones, which can last as long as 12 hours. Web browsing time was also sub-par at a mere 3 hours 14 minutes. The biggest culprit for this poor time is AT&T's power hungry 3G network, which gives you fast download speeds but at the price of battery life. If you browse the web a lot on your phone you will find that with the Duo you will quickly run out of battery life.
The Pantech Duo is an interesting phone that suffers from a few significant flaws. The build quality of the phone is poor which, combined with the dual slide design, leads us to worry about the Duo's durability. The camera on the Duo is also very poor, no one should expect to be able to take good photos on this device. Finally the battery life ranges from adequate to sub-par. Those looking for a small smart device may be attracted to the Duo, but we recommend you look at other options like the T-Mobile Shadow or BlackBerry Curve, where you get much better performance at a similar price.For a more in-depth review, visit the Pantech Duo Review at our partner WirelessInfo.com
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