Brand new phone from Pantech available on at&t. It’s a touch screen phone with a sliding QWERTY keyboard. It will be available June 6th for $49.99 with a two year contract.

Starting Sunday and for only $9.99 the Pantec Link will be available for at&t. The Link is the newest Quick Messaging Device for at&t wireless.

Cecilia over at our sister site CuteGeek.com posted her review on the Pantech Matrix Pro today, and while she liked the way the phone look, her overall impression wasn’t that great for the phone.

She pointed out that the UI for the phone wasn’t that appealing and that pretty much has to do with the fact it’s a Windows Mobile OS, but with Microsoft coming out with a better more stylish version of their mobile OS later this year, her impression might have been different.

Check out the review here.

Pantech has done it again, if you recall two years ago in November they gave us what I considered one of the best phones in 2008 the Pantech Duo. Now they give us the Matrix Pro a phone similar to the Pantech Duo but with a faster processor, newer sleekr elegant design and and Windows Mobile 6.1.

Like the Duo the Matrix Pro is a dual slider phone, but unlike the Duo the Matrix Pro works on at&t’s 3G network for faster mobile internet speeds, and with the bluetooth pal function you can easily share your mobile internet with your laptop. (Just don’t tell at&t you’re doing that)

The Matrix Pro has a beautiful 2.4” color display, full qwerty keyboard which is great for texting and IM’ing on, it also has a 2 megapixel camera that does both stills and video, GPS and supports up to a 32 GB SD card.

We will have an unboxing of the phone later today, and you can expect a review in the next week or so.

Don’t have a final word on pricing but as soon as I do I will update this post. The phone will be available from at&t starting today!

Today at&t and Pantec announced the C630, the fourth Pantec phone released for at&t wireless this quarter. I have laterally had the C630 handset fr about 6 hours now and it is like any other Pantec phone, affordable and feature rich and although it has a low price tag but it has a high quality build.

The C630 will retail for $39.99 with a two year contract, it features turn by turn GPS navigation with at&t navigator, bluetooth, 1.3 mega pixels camera, a microSD slot so you can listen to your MP3 on it (headphones sold separately), and video sharing capabilities and works on at&t’s 3G network.

Like I alredy said I have been using the phone for 6 hours and it’s amazing. The phone is one of the smallest I have ever used but the keyboard is large. Normally when you have a small phone the keyboard is also tiny and you often fumble over keys and impress the wrong ones. Not the case with the C630.

The phone is also very snappy, it boots u fast and loads the pre-installed programs like the at&t navigator pretty quickly. The phone also has a little joystick that makes it really easy to navigate the menus, although I wish it stuck out a bit more.

Call quality on the phone is superb, maybe it’s the 3G network but I don’t remember a call on at&t sounding so good, and the speaker phone also has really good quality. Even when listening to music the sound quality from the phone was good.

Browsing the web wasn’t as fun as I had hoped but that had more to do with the screen size than the phones performance. I use a smart phone with a big ol screen so I am kind of use to browsing the web with a bigger screen than the C630 has to offer. But other than that browsing the web was flawless and the at&t 3G network is fast provided you can get a 3G signal.

The phone also has a 1.3 Mega Pixel camera, and the picture quality is decent not the greatest but for a phone it’s decent for taking a quick snap shot and send it to your friends.

My only gripe with the phone is you need headphones with a special connector to listen to music (unless you don’t mind the people around you listening to your music while you walk down the street).

Overall the Phone is great and it is available now from AT&T and it would make a perfect gift for the holidays!  For more info visit http://wireless.att.com

Phone available Friday December 12th

Yesterday Pantech Unvieled the worlds smallest phone with a Qwerty Keyboard. The Pantech Slate which is available from at&t wireless for $49.99 after a 50 dollar mail in rebate and 2 year service agreement, not only features a Qwerty Keyboard but a 1.3 Mega Pixel camera and bluetooth.

“We are proud to bring yet another design first to Pantech customers,” said Patrick Beattie, vice president of sales and marketing for Pantech Wireless, Inc.  “Experience shows that users want increasingly unique devices that are easy to use.  The Slate, debuting as the world’s thinnest phone with a full QWERTY keypad, ushers in a new level of style and convenience for customers who need to text and email.”

This past Friday I got my hands on the new Pantec Matrix for at&t, a phone very much similar to the Pantech Duo, with one big exception the Matrix does not run Windows Mobile. Don’t think of this post as a review s it isn’t this is just my first impression and I will get a more detailed review later on. In my opinion Pantech has done a great job with the Matrix, it’s the perfect teen/young adult phone or a great phone for someone who loves to text.

Just like the Duo the Pantech Matrix is a dual slider, you slide it up to expose the number pad, you slide it to the right to expose the qwerty keyboard. The Phone is also very speedy, a lot of phones in particular windows mobile phones take at least a minute to boot up, the Matrix was booted really fast.

The UI is also easy to understand and so far I like it.

Keep an eye out for the full review soon. 

Over the past several months I have become a Pantech fan. From their C300 to the updated C3B and even the C150, I have fallen in love with the look and feel of their phones. They honestly seem to put a lot of thought into their phones and focus on what we as users really need and want.

Pantech continued their stylish and consumer oriented ways with the new Pantech Duo released on the 29th of October. (Some pictures at this link)

The Pantech Duo is a Windows Mobile based phone. It is loaded with cool features such as a 2.2 inch QVGA screen, voice commands, messenger programs (AIM, Live Messenger, Yahoo), a 1.3 Megapixel camera, support for microSD cards, Quad-band GPRS/EDGE with dual-band UMTS/HSDPA so you can use it around the world, Bluetooth, and a battery that promises 250 hours of standby time.

So, why is it called the Pantech Duo? It’s called the Duo because it’s a dual slider. What’s a slider phone? It is a phone whose keypad slides in and out. What’s a dual slider? It is the same thing as a slider except you get an additional keypad, or in the case of the Pantech Duo, a full QWERTY keyboard.

Now that you know a little about the phone, let’s get on with the review.

I have had the Pantech Duo for a little over ten days, and I have to say have been enjoying every minute with it. Each day I discover a new feature. The phone is fun to use, easy to learn, and does everything you want it to for a lot less than similar phones with the same or less features. It is probably one of the most fun phones I have used in a while.

The first thing I noticed when I first held the Pantech Duo, is that it isn’t as heavy as it looks. It only weighs 3.88 ounces with the battery. That’s far less than any Sidekick.
Speaking of the Sidekick, the Pantech Duo is a good alternative to the Sidekick. Being a previous sidekick owner, I often suffered with the not so great t-mobile network. While I didn’t have trouble with phone calls, the t-mobile data network constantly had outages. Over the past 9 days, I used the Duo in the same way I used my sidekick when I had one. I constantly had it connected to AIM, Yahoo, and Live Messenger, and I set it up so that I could receive my personal email on the device. There were occasions where I would receive a text message as many as 5 seconds after it was sent, I never experienced an outage of data service. While my friend who has a Sidekick had issues with receiving Instant Messages, especially at night.

Emailing, Messaging, and Texting on the Duo is comfortable and easy. Because of the full QWERTY keyboard, you’re able to use both your hands. Even if you just need to use one hand, you can use the numeric keypad. It may take you a bit longer to type something up, but you won’t end up dropping your Duo in the toilet like my friend Chrissy did; she dropped her Sidekick in the toilet while applying makeup.

But the Pantech Duo isn’t just for messaging. It has a dual purpose. Not only is it good for your everyday life, it’s also good for your work life. It’s a phone that’s cool enough to take to the club yet sophisticated enough to whip out during a business meeting to check your schedule, look up a contact, or check the web for some information.

I tried out the call quality on the phone. I have to say it’s pretty impressive. It’s better than the call quality on my T-Mobile Dash and the HTC Touch from Sprint. On my dash, I sometimes have to stick a finger in my left ear so that I can hear the call clearly from my right ear, even if the volume is all the way up. I really didn’t have that problem on the Duo.

I also have to give props to at&t. The signal I have had with them this past week and a half has been great. I have not had one dropped call all week. I can’t say the same for my T-Mobile phone service, and I now regret switching to T-Mobile. (Can read why I switched here) I think I will be switching back soon enough.

The Duo also has a 1.3 mega Pixel camera which does both still and video images. The picture quality and video quality were decent for a 1.3 mega pixel camera, and the sound quality in the videos was really good.

Speaking of Video and Sound quality, the Duo comes included with at&t Music and Cellular video. 

The at&t music feature works with eMusic, Napster, Yahoo Music, and XM Satellite radio. You have your pick of music service. You can also put music onto a microSD card and listen to it via the Windows Media Player in Windows Mobile. The sound quality is great with or without headphones.  Part of at&t music is that there is a MusicID feature which will help you ID music you are listening to. How does it work? Well you ask it to ID a song, you place the phone near the music source, and you will get a message that tells you what song it is. I tried it, and it worked pretty well.

The Cellular Video feature is also pretty cool. You can watch music videos and news. If you can name it, you can watch it. The video quality is a lot better than what I experienced with the HTC Touch from Sprint, and it was a lot crisper than the video quality on my T-Mobile Dash.

After I checked out the call quality and quality of the at&t services, I tested out the battery life. Again Pantech has amazed me with the battery life on the phone. With the default settings, I got nearly 12 hours of battery life with normal use for me which is about 5 to 10 phone calls ranging from 10 seconds to 30 minutes, browsing the web to check my weather, and sending a couple hundred text messages. I got 11 hours and 43 minutes exactly of battery life. Pantech advertises the Duo as having 3 hours of talk time.

The Pantech DUO is also probably the only Sub 200 dollar Windows Mobile based Smartphone that takes full advantage of the power of Windows Mobile.

For example, Windows Mobile 6 has Voice Commands, and I have used several smart phones. While the voice command feature works on them all to an extent, the Pantech Duo is the only Smartphone I have used this year that takes advantage of it fully; meaning you can hold a button and say “Call Home” and provided you have a contact named Home it will dial it for you, or you can say “text messages” “email” and your messaging center will be displayed.

Another cool thing about the voice commands on the Pantech Duo is that they can be set to read your text messages to you when you receive them. However, if you do enable it to do this, make sure you don’t receive any embarrassing text messages. As Deborah from Pantech pointed out, it can be very embarrassing. If you are curious as to how the voice on the phone sounds, it is the same female voice Windows Operating systems have. So, if you are running Windows, go to your control panel, select Text To Speech (in Windows Vista) or Speech (Windows XP), make sure Microsoft Anne is selected, and click preview voice. It’s not that bad sounding, but a bit robotic.

Just like other Windows Mobile smartphones, the Pantech Duo can handle your contacts, your appointments, and allow you to take your work with you; with the proper software, you can read and edit or create a new word document.

Overall, the Pantech Duo is fantastic, and the at&t service is better than what I remember. For that, we award both Pantech and at&t our 5 Star Editors choice award, because both companies have delivered a product and service that is dependable and reliable. At $199 with a 2 year contract, It is one of the cheapest, if not the cheapest, Smartphone on the market.

The Pantech Duo is available at all at&t wireless stores and online at http://www.attwireless.com. For more information about the Pantech Duo visit: http://www.pantechduo.com/ .

When I first heard about the Pantech C150 via a press release I knew the phone was small, but you don’t grasp how small it is until you actually hold one in your hand. It looks almost fragile in pictures but it isn’t I’ve already dropped it by accident and not a scratch on her.

I am pretty impressed with the Pantech C150, it’s super small, 4.1 inches tall and 1.7 inches wide and less than a third of an inch thick, it literally fits in the palm of my hand, it’s loaded with features such as a camera that does both stills and video and bluetooth. It also has a full color 1.8 inch LCD screen.

Aside from the small form factor and great looks of the phone, the first thing you notice is the user interface. It has to be one of the easiest and most straight forward UI I have ever seen. This is the first phone I can honestly say that I did not need the user manual to figure things out. Pantech did a great job developing the software for the phone.

The first thing I did with the phone was make a few calls, and purposely wasted the battery which took longer than I expected. I then charged the battery up which took less than an hour and I called my self and just let the phone sit to test battery life. I expected 4 hours 5 hours max before the battery was fully dead. Can anyone say 8 hours? It took a little over 8 hours of talk time to fully drain the battery. It took 2 hours to lower the battery power by 1 bar. I was stunned I thought maybe I did something wrong when testing, I looked at the call time for the last call when I plugged the phone in and it said the call lasted 8 hours 13 minutes.  I was really surprised by this because Pantech advertises the battery life at 3 hours of straight talk time. I then tested battery life with using data occasionally and that dropped down to 3 and a half hours, which is still pretty good better then my 400 dollar phone. (I ran the battery life a 2nd time and got just over 7 hours of straight talk time with the phones default settings)

Another thing I noticed right away when talking on the phone is the sound quality, I have the T-Mobile dash, and a Moto Razr and the sound quality on the Pantech C150 put both of those phones to shame, the speaker on the C150 is also much clearer than on my Dash and Razr.

I also did some web browsing on the phone and I am not sure if it’s the phone or not but the data transfer rate seemed faster on the C150 than it did on my Moto Razr on the same network.

The phone has a large screen for a phone of its size, and the screen is crystal clear and the number you dial appears large on the screen.  Texting is also easier for me because of how big everything appears on screen.

My mom who came over for dinner saw the phone and fell in love with it right away, the first words out of her mouth were and I quote “I love phones that are small like this one, but I can never read what’s on the screen” She has bad vision so she likes phones which display big numbers. I told her to dial a number and try it out just to get her reaction when she saw the numbers on the screen, she loved it even more. I think I will be getting her one for Christmas.

The C150 has a camera and while I was testing it out, I was a bit disappointed in the quality, but then I realized the lens was covered with a piece of protective plastic and when I removed it the pictures were a lot clearer, definitely not the best picture quality but it is good for a camera phone. To see a picture taken with the phone click here. The video quality is just as good.

Overall the Pantech C150 is a great phone, offers a lot features for a low price, and even though it doesn’t look like it can withstand a lot of wear and tear it can. So we here at CellRants.com award the C150 our 5 Start Must Have award. We don’t have any awards made out yet so we are using our sister site HardwareGeeks.com award in the mean time.

The C150 retails for $199, free with 2 year contract with wireless from at&t.

Full Phone Specs:
Weight: 2.57 ounces
Dimensions: 4.1 x 1.7 x .5 inches
Talk Time: Up to 3 hours according to Pantech (but I went 8 hours without the battery dyeing)
Standby Time: Up to 10 days
Tri-band world phone - 850/1800/1900 MHz
Address book stores up to 800 entries
260K TFT color screen with 128 x 160 pixels
Universal headset capable for hands free use
Warranty: One year on the phone and accessories
All talk, data, and standby times depend on network configuration

Pantech has upgraded the worlds smallest camera flip-phone (per volume) to include bluetooth. The Pantech C3b is one of the coolest little phones I have ever seen and I even considered purchasing the older version last year.

Pantech C3b features include:
-- Bluetooth
-- Changeable faceplates in multiple colors
-- Mobile Email services supported for Yahoo! Mail, AOL and MSN Hotmail
-- VGA camera with flash and 4x digital zoom in LCD mode
-- Multimedia Messaging Services allows users to send pictures, sounds and text with interactive messaging
-- Downloadable music ringtones (MP3, MIDI & i-Melody)
-- Downloadable wallpapers and screensavers
-- Data transmission via GPRS
-- Picture and ringtone caller ID
-- Predictive text input
-- Calendar and reminders

The C3B is currently available from at&t Cingular, price is currently unknown.

Image in this post is of older phone, please visit our forums for updated pictures.

Click here for more pictures.