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/ .

I like the full keyboard it has and the price point on it