AT&T is trotting out a new QWERTY messaging phone, the
Pantech Swift, going on sale today.
With its lavender accents, there's little question of
Pantech's young audience, and the compact phone is appropriately priced at
$69.99 with two-year contract and after a $50 mail-in rebate.
The QWERTY keyboard, by the way, supplements the otherwise
too-small 2.8-inch QVGA touch screen. Pantech has also added some curvature --
a slightly curved screen that also angles up when you slide it open.
Button-pushers will also get a single hardware select button beneath the
phone's face.
The Swift comes with a 2-megapixel camera with video
capture, a Web browser, and an onboard e-mail client. There are also social
networking clients onboard like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, plus AT&T's
usual roundup of family-tracking and navigation apps. Yellow Pages Mobile and
several game demos come preloaded as well.
The good: The Pantech Swift QWERTY slider is cute as a button, has an angled screen, and uses finger-friendly icons and a home button for easy navigation.
The bad: The Swift is scuffable despite its weight, its processor is extremely slow, and the touch screen is unresponsive.
The bottom line: Though the Pantech Swift is the most appealing Pantech handset on AT&T with a keyboard, but sufficient flaws keep us hesitant to recommend it widely.
The Swift accepts up to 32GB in expandable memory, but has a
slower processor (600MHz) and a smaller battery (1,000mAh) than we'd like.
Fellow CNET mobile editor Lynn La and I got our hands on the
phone ahead of launch -- catch out full Pantech Swift review here.
No comments:
Post a Comment