Pantech Matrix - Review

Phone Arena is testing and reviewing mobile phones for you. This video focus' on the Pantech Matrix.

Pantech Matrix - Review Hello and welcome to the PhoneArena.com video review of the Pantech Matrix. This device is currently available right now with AT&T and it supports a unique design here. It has a dual slider mechanism. It has a traditional keypad, numeric keypad, and when you open it left to right, it reveals a full QWERTY keyboard. Now the Matrix is build as a text messaging device of anyone text messengers, email. It is the messaging applications so this is the perfect device for you here. It actually looks similar to Pantech Dual which is released last year for AT&T. That phone was a Windows Mobile powered new device where this one here is a non-Smart phone and uses AT&T’s proprietary user interface. Now as far as design goes, we did like the overall design of the Matrix here. It has a blue shiny plastic. It has almost like a polished look to it which does a very good job as far as you know feeling it in your hand. It also uses sand blue, shiny plastic on the back and in between you have a silver plastic that actually accents the device pretty nice. It’s a little bit on the heavier side and also a little bit thicker than other traditional slider phones here but we did like the fact that when you placed in your hands you know it feels heavy. It’s not wide enough to feel it too bulky at all when the compared to something like AT&T Tilt here. On the front, the first thing you can see here is the navigation pad with the selection key in the middle here. On the left and right sides are the soft keys on top and you have left them right soft keys right here. You have dedicated music application when you press that extra bolt it will give a list thing of all the music applications you have run on device and also you have a back and click right here, your send key and also the end key. The problem that we have with it is that the key is where itself were a little bit smaller so people or individuals with larger fingers you might probably notice using the tip of your finger more often or even a fingernail just to press the soft keys here. The screen though is adequate. It is not as bright when compared to some other phones but it does the job well and brightly lit areas and direct sunlight. You probably will have a little bit of hard time with that and it might be a slight glare with it but incomplete darkness we didn’t really have any issues viewing the screen. And the speaker on the top here, the only gripe that we have about with it is the fact that it does not seem to loud enough so we just wished that it was amplified a little bit more. We have to basically put the sound on its high setting just to hear anyone. Now on the left side, the volume rocker is placed appropriately on the device. On the other side of that, we have a dedicated camera button for your video and also camera application. You have the proprietary USB charging port here. Unfortunately, though the Pantech decided to stick with their own connection rather than traditional mini-USB or even a micro USB slot. The thing that we did like though on the Matrix is the fact that the microSD card slot is located on the top of the device here. It is really convenient to actually stick out the card itself instead of removing the battery cover and going through the battery just to get this slot but this is pretty neat just being getting better access to it. You could hot swapped different cards at different times but it didn’t have any problems doing that here but we did like at the back that it is located on top and not behind the battery here. On the back, we have a 1.3-megapixel camera with a speakerphone. Speaker phone does a great job when playing any audio or you're in a video on the device. It didn’t really crackle even for phone calls. We had a pretty good performance with that here. Now we slide the device open. Again, it is build as a text messaging device. It is a slider phone. We did like the snappy feeling that we get when you open it and close it. The keys itself here are flushed. It has a blue. It is backlit with a blue color. It does a good job accenting well with the silver background here especially in complete darkness. It looks really well in the dark. When you slide open the phone, open the other way it reveals the full QWERTY keyboard here. Now the keys itself, they are slightly raised but we just wish that the keys itself were a little bit raised a little bit more because it kind of feels like, it looks almost flushed with the surface here but they are slightly raised. The numbers are dictated or distinguished in the blue keys just so that it makes it easier for you to see and the keys are spaced pretty evenly. We didn’t have really too much real problem using the full QWERTY keyboard for texting or sending a message here. Now again just like the soft keys here, individuals with larger fingers will probably be using the edge of their finger or even their fingernail to press the button but we didn’t have any problems using the full QWERTY keyboard unlike the overall feeling that the phone provides when opening and close it here. As we mentioned before the Matrix actually has a good backlighting with the numeric keypad. It has a bluish hue to here which does a good job in contrast with the silver with the background here. As far as the QWERTY keyboard is concerned here, again it does a nice job of backlighting the keys. It is very visible at night. You won’t have any problem viewing it in complete darkness and even daylight. We have no problem seeing the keys itself here. As we mentioned earlier, the Matrix is actually a non-Smartphone device so it has a very simple interface and a very user-friendly here. If you’ve owned an AT&T phone within the last year, you will probably be familiar with this interface. Like we said again, it is very basic. From here, this is the home screen. You have your clock on the top right now, you see your date. When you go into your main menu here, click the menu button. You're going to be greeted with the great view here of all the various applications you could run starting from AT&T music. You have your messaging, software, yellow pages, media net, and media mall. You have your AT&T GPS, Live Stock, address book and settings. As far as the user interface goes, it is very simple like we said not as many you know flashy animations going on. The great thing about it is it is very quick, very swift, and didn’t have any slow down or any problems really running in itself running device. The first thing we wouldn’t go in to state AT&T application here. From here, you’re going to be able to launch a variety of different stuff related to music. For example, you have the music player and you could start playing music. It is very simple. So if you start running a song or playing song here, you’re going to have your application running here. And now see it’s going to show you the track, the title, and you will now uncover if it has one. If you go back to the home screen, you’ll notice on the home screen you will be able to touch whatever mini player running in the background. So the song will run on the background as a recent device. If we go back to the AT&T music you have other feature such as XM radio if you have an account. You’ll be able to use XM radio on the device, music ID and other popular application that allows you to tag specific song and if you don’t know the artist I'll tell you also stuff like the name of the song itself here. As we said before also, the Matrix is build as a text messaging device. Thanks to the QWERTY keyboard here. And as far as messaging goes, there’s a bunch of different stuff you could do with the Matrix here. You can all see some text messages or traditional text messages, picture messaging to any user here. Using the full QWERTY keyboard is probably the best option when inputting text into it. As far as email goes though, it has the mobile e-mail which comes on pretty much most of the AT&T devices. If you use it before it’s the same exactly interface here. The downside with these applications that it does not include specific email accounts so if you have one that is not listed in the options here and fortunately you don’t have a lock key you wouldn’t be able to ask your email. Some of the providers that the Matrix does support is Yahoo, AOL, AIM, Hotmail and if you go to other providers. Unfortunately, this is all that’s going to provide you if yours is not on the list here. Unfortunately, you're not going to be able and just not can be away for you to touch it and put in it to the device. We just wish that the enough mobile email provided the specific incoming albums that were addresses so you could use your specific email account here. As far as the other applications running if you look at instant messaging we did like the Instant Messenger client on the device. It only allows you Instant Messenger, AOL, we have Windows Live Messenger and also Yahoo Messenger. The great thing about is that if we do run the application you put your username and password. It will actually run in the background. So if you do exit out the application and go back to the home screen you will notice like there’s going to be an icon on the top right corner to signify if someone has messaged you back. We just like that feature, having it and running background so that the device is always connected. 3G supported on the device is enabled for high speed internet access. Thanks to the AT&T and 3G network here. The one thing that we did notice with the Matrix though whenever you're opening up a web page, sometimes it doesn’t display it as it’s downloading it. As you can see right here on the screen here, we are trying to get into our website and it’s taking a little bit of time. It’s not actually loading up the page as it’s downloading it. Sometimes, it’ll just wait till the whole page is downloaded before it actually loads it up on screen or in some cases you will see that actually load up on the screen while it is downloading at the same time. Now we have it so that it’s on full screen. We also like to feature that it actually has a thumbnail view when you’re scrolling. Scrolling does take some time. It takes quite a bit of time for it to render some of the images here. As far as the web browsing experience it is not on par as when compared to something like you know the iPhone 3G but for basic browser using media net, it does the job fine. You could set the settings to actually use no text view so that it will just render the page in one single column rather than anything else and make it easier for you to scroll it with texting. We have options to not display text. I mean not to display pictures so it does the load or scroll a lot faster here. For a basic web browser, it’s basic. It is an okay job other than the fact that it does take quite some time for a page to load up and also for scrolling. Scrolling does take some time here. Now, the contacts are pretty easy with the address book here, very simple and easy to use interface. It basically lies to hold over I believe 1000 contacts on the device itself. You could add in different up to I believe for different numbers and also email addresses, URLs, web pages, a fax number even but it is very basic. It is very simple and easy to use here. Other applications that you’ll find AT&T GPS with the phone are powered by the AT&T navigator which is powered by Tel Napier. It is really easy to use interface, no problems with getting a GPS signal. It will give you turn by turn directions and also point of interests in. It also announce treats as my name rather than to saying left or right but it’s the same as active program that you’ve seen on other AT&T phones with the AT&T navigator preinstalled. My stuff is basically your area, your explorer for audio, games, applications, and also your pictures. There are other specific tools and utilities that you can use here. For example like there is no pad built-in to the Matrix. Unfortunately, the only downside with this no pad is that you could only input up to 100 characters on the notes before having to load a new setup of a new notepad and save it again here. Now, running the camera application, it’s an easy to use interface as well, very basic, just as the user interface on the device itself. You can run it through the menus on the Matrix or just like pressing on the dedicated camera button on their right hand side of the device. You could change the brightness. You could even change the settings, the options, and as far as white balance. You can change the different effects from black and white to Sepia. There’s also the self timer if you want to take still images here. Picture size will vary depending on which option you’ll take. It’s a 1.3-megapixel camera. We find that the photos came out very all right. On most part, low lit areas unfortunately, the colors are a little bit dull and also you would notice a little bit of fuzziness with it but in bright lit areas, it does pretty good job, still colors are a little bit washed out and outdoor shots are probably best. As far as the video is concerned taking videos on the Matrix are very, very choppy. Unfortunately, the device itself does not have a lot of pixel density tab nice videos running on it here but it is enabled for video share so if you have another device that has its video share capable, you could actually send video on real time as you're speaking to them and conversing to them here. The device itself has mediocre camera features here. As far as the performance goes on the Matrix, call quality was quite clear and we didn’t have any problems really listening or people hearing us here. Speaker call quality is probably one of the best things that we should notice on the device. We rarely heard the speaker crack here especially when placed at slider setting. Unfortunately when you are listening to a conversation to the regular speaker, it is kind on the low side so you probably have to put it on its maximum setting to actually hear anyone here. As far as battery life goes, the Matrix did give us quite a little bit of time with battery life. Unfortunately, when compared to a similar basic slider phones it doesn’t give as long as talk time or standby time but it did made up to the manufacture specs that when we tested it here. It is a 3G device so you know in your area has 3G, 3G speeds a little bit slow on device toning up but again that’s just due to the fact that the browser it does not as much depth as something like Internet Explorer or even the Apple Mobile, Safari here. Overall, we did like the phone especially the design. Design is probably one of the greatest things about the device itself with the numeric keypad and also the full QWERTY keyboard here. We did enjoy typing on the device. Overall, the build quality and also workmanship on the device definitely does show. Unfortunately, right now it’s not an all-in-one phone. It doesn’t have great specs but as far as it is a messaging device it does beat at some others compared to some other devices here. So if you want, you can head on over right now. The Matrix is available on AT&T right now. Again, we did like the full QWERTY keyboard on the device.