We check out the thinnest full QWERTY phone on the market, available now for free on AT&T. Did this phone trim off too much weight? Find out in our Pantech Slate review.
Review summary of the Pantech Slate:
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 If you use one of the few e-mail clients that the Pantech Slate supports (mostly AOL, MSN and Yahoo), and you're looking for a phone that does almost nothing besides simple e-mail and text messaging, the Slate is a nice option, thanks to its super-thin shell and great price (now free on AT&T). But if you're expecting a robust, capable messaging phone, the Pantech Slate couldn't be farther from your expectations. Messaging options are few and far between, with no Gmail support and no custom e-mail settings, let alone more advanced and fun social networking options. We liked the keyboard, but were stymied by the ineffective rocker switch and other buttons on this phone. Web browsing was acceptable, though not great, and please don't get us started on the problems we had with the camera. Pantech brags about the Slate being the thinnest QWERTY phone on the market (check out our comparison of compact, full QWERTY phones here), but we'll take away those bragging rights since most buyers will be left out with the Slate's lack of messaging abilities. Perhaps its time for a Pantech Slate Pro? Release: October 2008. Price: $1.
Pros: Nice keyboard. Very thin full QWERTY phone.
Cons: Lacks features, especially messaging options. Rocker switch doesn't work in key applications. Photo management options don't work properly.
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Full Pantech Slate Review:
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Design – Good
Pantech brags that the Pantech Slate on AT&T is the thinnest full-QWERTY phone you can buy. While it wasn't the thinnest phone we've ever used, it certainly was a very thin QWERTY slab, so we can't argue with that claim. The Peek e-mail device claims to be about the same size, but that strange beast can't make calls (or do anything else), so we'll give the Pantech Slate the win. Besides being thin, the Pantech Slate has a couple nice design features, and a few troubling aspects we would change. We liked the rocker switch on the side of the phone. This made browsing the menus a breeze. We miss these thumb wheels and switches. It seems like touchscreens and trackballs have overtaken the thumb wheels, and that's a shame. Unfortunately, the rocker switch didn't work where we needed it to work. We could use it to select the e-mail app on the main menu, but then it didn't work in the e-mail program. So, we couldn't use it to thumb through messages, BlackBerry style. This seems like a serious design flaw.
We loved the keyboard on the Pantech Slate. For such a thin phone, the keys were still raised off the phone to a comfortable height. Typing was a breeze. The navigation keys, including the "Send" and "End" keys and the speakerphone button, were not so easy to use. Because of their curving, wavy shape, we had a tendency to press the wrong key if we didn't aim carefully. Also, on a messaging phone, we would rather have a dedicated messaging key than a speakerphone key. There is a tiny messaging shortcut on the bottom of the keyboard, but you have to hold the function key to use it. We'd like to jump into our messages in a single click, instead.
Calling - Good
Call quality on the Pantech Slate was nothing impressive. Calls sounded okay on both ends, but we heard a steady hiss on our end of the call. Callers reported a muffled quality to our voice. Reception was solid, usually around 5 bars of service, and the Pantech Slate received a signal as strong as any AT&T phone we have in our testing labs. Battery life was surprisingly poor. Pantech promises only 3 hours of talk time, and that's about all you can expect. We managed about 3.5 hours, but for a phone that uses AT&T's slower EDGE networking, we expected better power management. 5 hours should be the minimum here.
For calling features, we were disappointed with the address book on the Pantech Slate. There were plenty of phone number fields, but little else. The address book will hang onto e-mail addresses, but you can't send an e-mail from the contact list, so what's the point? Conference calling was easy enough with a little menu drilling. We also found the speakerphone to be adequate, though not as loud as we'd like.
Messaging - Good
For a phone that brags about being the thinnest messaging phone available, we were disappointed by the lack of messaging options on the Pantech Slate. Text messaging is available, of course, and the SMS app looked pretty good. We were able to fit about 2/3 of a text message on screen at once, though we could only read about 3 lines of an incoming message. Text looked a little blocky, but was large enough on the Slate's wide screen to be legible.
As we said earlier, we did like the keyboard on the Slate. Besides the large keyboard, we liked that holding down a key activated the symbol above it. This is a nice trick that we wish all QWERTY phones would use. But that's all for tricks on the Pantech Slate. The phone misses some essentials, like automatically capitalizing a word after a period.
For e-mail and instant messaging, options are quite limited. AOL, MSN and Yahoo are supported in various flavors of IM and e-mail, but most other services are left out. For IM, only those 3 are supported. For e-mail, there is a short list of 9 services, including BellSouth, Comcast and a few popular e-mail providers. But there is no Gmail support, and no way to add your own e-mail service. While Yahoo users might be in luck, it seems silly to sell a messaging phone that leaves out a vast majority of e-mail users. We expect to be able to customize our e-mail settings at the worst. At best, we'd like to see Facebook, MySpace and other social networking apps available for messaging on this phone.
Web browsing - Mediocre
We have to give the Pantech Slate points for trying, but ultimately the Web browsing experience was disappointing, though not unusable. The Slate loaded our own homepage in its entirety, where most basic phones tend to crash trying to load all of our images. Text layout was a little off, but not so much that we couldn't read it. Our real problem was navigating pages. We couldn't fit an entire paragraph on screen at once, and the Pantech Slate has no zooming options to make large pages more manageable. Scrolling around large pages was also a chore, as the phone was very slow to pan. Simple mobile pages, designed for small cell phone screens, were obviously better, so users looking for a more basic Web browsing experience will have a better time with the Slate.
Camera - Mediocre
We'd like to show off some samples of the images we took with the phone's 1.3-megapixel camera, but for the life of us we can't figure out how. The phone has no expansion memory slot, so we couldn't simply read the images off a card. The phone has a USB port, but there are no drivers for Pantech's proprietary USB cable, and neither Windows Vista nor Mac OS X could recognize the phone. We tried a Bluetooth transfer, but this failed every time. We even tried uploading the pictures to our HP Snapfish account, as this is an option on the phone. But the pics we sent never actually appeared on Snapfish, even though the phone claimed to have sent them. For MMS messages, the phone reduces the picture size, rendering the 1.3-megapixel sensor completely useless.
Price and availability
The Pantech Slate is available now from AT&T for free with a contract agreement and mail-in rebate.
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