The shiny and light C120 crams a VGA camera into its half inch-thick profile. Is this slim handset (part of Cingular's GoPhone lineup) worth paying as you go, or should you leave it behind?
Review summary of the Pantech C120:
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 While it's admirably small and light, with nicely designed keys packed into a tight keypad, the Pantech C120 (which Cingular offers through its pay-as-you-go GoPhone plan) suffers from poor call quality, a mediocre display and iffy messaging features. With its slim profile, VGA camera and tri-band support for some international usefulness, the C120 might suffice for style-mongers who don't want to sign a long-term service contract, but regular chatters can certainly do better. Release: October 2006. Price: $50.
Pros: Small size and lightweight. Supports popular IM protocols.
Cons: Poor voice quality. So-so message editor. Mediocre display.
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Full Pantech C120 Review:
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Design
While the pleasingly thin (0.5 inches) Pantech C120 qualifies as a low-end phone, it certainly doesn't feel cheap. Navigation is handled by a five-way navigational joystick which was pleasantly stiff; indeed, we never made selection errors. The phone sports a VGA camera, and the 1.5-inch, 120 by 120 pixel, 65,000-color screen looked merely adequate, with the low resolution making for blocky-looking text, while colors seemed a bit washed out.
Calling - Mediocre
Call quality on the tri-band GSM Pantech C120 is below average, with plenty of static and background noise audible over garbled speech despite our full signal reception. Conference calling on the phone was surprisingly easy, but the speakerphone was difficult to access, and the phone lacks voice-dialing capabilities. The contact list could hardly manage the contacts on our SIM card, splitting individuals with multiple numbers into multiple entries and losing most of the last names. Entering new contacts was easy, but we wish more fields were offered for each contact. And while you can assign specific ringtones to each contact, no MP3s ringtones are available -- just polyphonic tones and vibrations.
Messaging - Good
Messaging on the C120 gets slightly better treatment than does calling, but not much. The keys are sloped up toward the bottom, so they aren't individually hard to distinguish, but the overall size of the keypad means you'll have to reposition your thumb to cover all the keys. SMS gets only about half of a full SMS message (or about 80 characters) on screen at once. Handling messages is difficult, with limited folder options and no icon to let you know you've already replied to a message. Menus were a bit frustrating to navigate as well, and we found ourselves accidentally backing out of messages more than once. Back on the plus side, the C120 boasts instant messaging through Yahoo, AIM, or MSN, a welcome feature on a low-end phone.
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Samsung SGH-T519
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Score: 54% When: September 2006 Worth: $Free Carrier: T-Mobile
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The Samsung Trace is supermodel thin, yet it packs in a 1.3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, and memory expansion. Philip Berne takes the T519 off the runway for a real-world road test.
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Read » Gallery »
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Price and availability
Available now on Cingular's GoPhone pre-paid service for about $50.
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