Pantech Duo™

Call Quality

Call quality: We found the call quality over AT&T’s network to be mediocre at best. Though callers never had trouble hearing us, voice often sounded muffled on our end and we experienced a lot of background hiss during conversations. Calls over the speakerphone weren’t any better, especially because of significant distortion at higher volumes. Voices did sound a bit clearer over a Bluetooth headset.

Audio quality: Music playback sounded very good through our earbud headphones, despite the fact that the mobile version of Windows Media Player doesn’t include bass and treble adjustments. The external speaker is loud enough to listen to music while sitting at your desk, but the quality is too distorted to listen to it enjoyably.

Ease of Use

Menu/phone book: If you’re familiar with Windows Mobile, or Windows for that matter, you should be able to dig right into the Pantech Duo. The device sports the familiar Windows Mobile home screen. By default, the home screen features the Start menu on the bottom left, Contacts on the bottom right, and icons for recently used applications in a ribbon at the top. In between you get one-touch access to e-mail and voicemail messages, appointments, tasks, and IM accounts. You can also customize the background image, theme, and displayed menu items. The 416MHz processor runs Windows Mobile 6 applications at a decent clip, although the device gets a little balky when switching between portrait and landscape modes.

The phone book is limited only by available memory, while the SIM card holds an additional 250 contacts. You can store up to 12 numbers per entry, plus e-mail and street addresses, IM screen name, and other info. Through Microsoft ActiveSync, the Duo synced with our Outlook address book flawlessly.

Messaging: Though it doesn’t look so at first glance, the Duo is a smartphone, so you get full messaging capabilities. We downloaded the free Xpress Mail Client to manage our e-mail accounts. After entering the user name and passwords for each account, Xpress Mail automatically downloaded the rest of our settings. Xpress Mail supports POP3 and IMAP accounts, and corporate users can synchronize contacts, calendar events, and tasks through the Microsoft Exchange server.

Messages from our Comcast and Gmail accounts appeared instantly in our inbox (and disappeared after we read or deleted them from the computer). The Duo’s e-mail support includes Microsoft Direct Push technology for real-time e-mail delivery. The Duo also comes loaded with AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN Messenger instant messaging clients. You can keep all three accounts active simultaneously, but there’s no one-button toggling among the three accounts.

Camera: The Pantech Duo sports a 1.3-megapixel camera. Images were fuzzy, although colors were surprisingly vivid. You can use the navigation button to adjust the brightness or zoom in and out without having to go through the menu. Other settings include three quality options, four white balance modes, four color effects, a self-timer, a 4x zoom, and a self-portrait mirror next to the lens on the back of the device. The Duo also features a camcorder, though the quality of the video could be better.

Music: Music playback is becoming a standard smartphone feature, and the Duo lets you sync tracks from Windows Media Player onto a microSD storage card. It supports MP3, protected WMA, and AAC files. The mobile version of Windows Media offers album art, playlist creation, and shuffle/repeat modes. The AT&T Music store supports Napster downloads, and you can subscribe to XM Satellite Radio. The Duo doesn’t come with headphones, but it does include a 3.5mm stereo headphone adapter in the package, so you can use your own stereo headset with it to listen to your tunes.

Bluetooth: The Duo supports Bluetooth 2.0, so it supports wireless stereo headphones and dial-up networking as well as basic hands-free headsets. We paired the Duo with a Plantronics Discovery 610 headset without any problems.

Design

Look and feel: On the positive side, the 2.2-inch QVGA display features bright colors and crisp text and images. The display automatically switches from portrait to landscape mode when you slide out the QWERTY keyboard. Below the display you’ll find a five-way navigation key, two soft keys, buttons for talk and call end/power, a Home key, and a Back key for returning to the previous page. A Quick List key provides one-touch access to power and sound profiles (it also doubles as the keyguard lock). The left spine holds the volume rocker, while the right spine includes the camera and voice recorder buttons. The microSD card slot sits at the top of the unit. Because of the dual-slider design, the Duo is too bulky to slip into your front pants pocket, though it’s not as heavy as you’d imagine. The slick red plastic is prone to fingerprints, so you find yourself wiping it off a lot. We never felt really comfortable holding the phone during conversations either with the slide open or closed.

Keypad: Though it’s a great inclusion in what looks like a standard cell phone, the QWERTY keypad could be better. The keys are not only tiny, they’re flat, making it difficult to thumb type unless you have long fingernails. We often found ourselves pressing the wrong button, a real annoyance when typing long e-mails or chatting in IM sessions. The dial pad buttons are somewhat better. They’re nicely sized and slightly curved, though a bit slippery.

Battery Life

The Duo did comparably well in the battery life department for a smartphone. We found that for regularly monitoring of e-mails and making the occasional call, you’ll need to recharge the battery every other day. If you make lots of calls and use push e-mail delivery, expect to charge the unit daily.