We slide out the Pantech Duo, a dual slider from the folks who brought us the Helio Ocean. Does Windows Mobile 6 fit in this diminutive device?
Review summary of the Pantech Duo:
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 The Pantech Duo is a nice alternative to other Windows Mobile Standard devices on the market, like the Motorola Q. Instead of that phone’s slab form and bulk, the Duo offers an elegant compromise. A little bit of bulk for a QWERTY keyboard. Suffer through flat keys for a versatile design. It wasn’t a speedy phone, in terms of the interface, but we have yet to see a Windows Mobile phone that felt zippy. The phone makes up for it with some good, but not great, multimedia options that extend the value of Windows Mobile, but we would like to see improvements all around, starting with the proprietary connector and the limping Office Mobile and ending with a redesigned keyboard. Still, even with our complaints, the Duo remains a very likable phone, so customers who are familiar with the pitfalls of Windows Mobile will be satisfied with the unique little slider. Release: October 2007. Price: $180.
Pros: Unique design, more compact than the Helio Ocean. Good browsing speeds on AT&T’s HSDPA network.
Cons: Flat, cramped keyboard makes messaging difficult. Mobile Office is hobbled. Proprietary connector a hassle.
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Full Pantech Duo Review:
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Design – Very good
It should come as no surprise that the company that designed the Helio Ocean also designed the Duo. Indeed, Pantech’s design is innovative, and we genuinely found ourselves taking advantage of the phone’s numeric keypad, instead of simply sliding out the more-capable QWERTY pad. It’s a bit too thick to fool anyone into thinking it’s just a slider, but it much smaller than Helio’s larger messaging device, and as such seems friendlier to hold and to carry around for casual use.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to get casual with Windows Mobile 6, and Pantech has done little here to improve upon the WM6 Standard (read: non-touchscreen) interface. The Today screen extends just a bit too far off screen, requiring scrolling, and we often wanted to poke at an option, hoping for touch capabilities to magically appear. Still, the phone did its best, and nagging performance issues, like a lag in the system as the screen switched from portrait to landscape, were kept to a minimum.
Calling – Very good
Calls on the Pantech Duo sounded very good. We encountered a bit of static, and a general hollowness to voices on both sides of the conversation, but reception was usually strong, a good three to four bars of 3G signal in our lower Manhattan offices. Because its Windows Mobile, call management is excellent, including some of our favorite features like the ability to jump into a live search of the address book from the Today screen, and the logging of calls into our contact list, so we can see our call history for individuals, and not just as a list. Talk time was adequate, we got about 4 hours and 15 minutes of talking, which beat the 3 hours Pantech promises by a nice margin, but we would have liked to see the phone go for 5 hours or more. We blame HSDPA, which is a known battery hog, even when you use it just to talk.
Messaging – Good
The phone packs plenty of messaging features with Windows Mobile, including the new Outlook, which can read e-mails sent as HTML, as well as instant messaging for AOL, MSN and Yahoo. Unfortunately, AT&T’s Xpress Mail program isn’t quite as powerful as the recently-update Outlook, so if you’re not using an Exchange ActiveSync account, the experience isn’t as great, but that’s Microsoft for you.
Typing on the Duo’s keyboard was problematic. The top row of keys come perilously close to the cliff’s edge of the upper half of the slide, which made typing difficult. Also, the keys are very flat, so we couldn’t rely on typing by feel, we had to stare at our fingers. For some reason, the layout of the keys irked us as well. The three straight rows always seemed to place out hands above the keys, obscuring our view. We definitely prefer the keys on the Helio Ocean, but that phone adds a lot of bulk for comfort, so it’s a trade-off.
Multimedia – Good
The Pantech Duo gets the full AT&T mobile media treatment, so you’ll have access to Cellular Video and AT&T Music (which really means Napster and Rhapsody, among others). Unfortunately, once the new Napster mobile store goes live, it won’t be available to Duo users, but support for any DRM is always nice. Unfortunately, the phone relies on the standard Windows Media player for playback, which is lacking in features and aesthetics, to say the least. Still, the Duo sounded fine, and had no trouble pairing with our stereo Bluetooth headset for music. We even appreciate the included adapted which let us plug our own standard headphones into the proprietary Pantech USB port. Feel free to skip the Cellular Video offering, since none of the available short clips are worth the price of admission.
Scheduling and productivity – Good
If you have everything in place on your desktop PC, the Pantech Duo does a fine job mirroring Outlook for scheduling. Entering new appointments could have been easier, perhaps with a touch screen and a better keyboard, but the scheduling app on the Duo is robust nonetheless. Unfortunately, the version of Windows Office Mobile included with the device is hobbled, and intended for reading documents, not creating them. Though company reps seemed genuinely surprised to learn, at the launch event for the Duo, that Office Mobile on WM6 Standard could not create new documents, no update has come along to fix the problem, so for now, if you don’t have a document ready to view, you won’t be working with Office on your phone. If you do need to work on a Word doc or an Excel spreadsheet, the mobile Office suite is surprisingly deep, even allowing some advanced formatting in Word.
Camera – Poor
The camera on the Pantech Duo is among the worst we’ve tried. Colors were deeply oversaturated, lending a cartoon-like look to indoor scenes. We found excessive noise in low-light areas, purpling and overexposure in the white parts, and a generally fuzziness that was compiimented by compression artifacts. Video was no better. Avoid using the camera at all costs, unless you see Elvis in a local diner, but then nobody will believe that fuzzy bear is really Elvis, anyway.
Web browsing – Good
We weren’t impressed as much by the Web browser on the Pantech Duo. It uses plain-old Internet Explorer after all, which does a mediocre job at best, and pales in comparison to recent offerings from Apple and Nokia. What we did appreciate was the swiftness with which pages loaded. The Pantech Duo takes advantage of AT&T’s HSDPA network, and feels like a very fast little phone when it comes to Web browsing. We would have liked a higher quality browser, but for pages designed for mobile devices, like the New York Times mobile page, text loaded quickly, and graphics popped up without much delay.
Laptop sidekick – Good
Once again, the Pantech Duo came through in terms of networking speed, but failed to really win us over as a laptop companion. First of all, the Duo uses a proprietary connector for USB and headphones. This means you’ll need to pack an extra cable, and if you forget it, good luck borrowing from someone else with a Pantech phone, because there aren’t many on the market. Second, we had some issues with AT&T’s Connection Manager software. After having spent some time with the Internet Sharing app on other devices, like the HTC Touch Dual, we’ve decided that is the only way to go for tethered modem support. Easy, reliable, without the need for third-party software, it is definitely our choice, and we wish tethering the Duo was so easy.
Price and availability
The Pantech Duo is available now from AT&T for $180 with a contract agreement. A mail-in rebate of $100 is available, when signing up for a qualifying plan.
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