Pantech Matrix Review

Performance:

Phone conversations came out decent with no major background noise. We had to place the phone on the highest volume setting in order to hear our conversations and found it too difficult to hear someone when placed on low or middle setting. Speakerphone quality was superb with no crackling sounds emanating from the device when placed on the highest setting.  Others stated that our voice was clear on their end during a phone call. Reception was a little bit disappointing because we found the Matrix having usually one less bar than other AT&T phones. Testing out AT&T’s 3G network on the device was no problem in the greater New York metropolitan area. Mobile friendly sites loaded up really fast while more complex ones took up more time and found ourselves waiting a lot. Sometimes pages won’t load until the entire site has been downloaded. Generally you would start seeing some text pop up first and multimedia files after, but in some instances you have to wait until it is fully downloaded before something even loads.


We would have expected this device to have better battery life since it is not a smart phone, but the smaller battery (920 mAh) is rated for 3 hours of talk time and 240 hours of standby. Although it is rated with low numbers, we found that the battery charge to be 2/3 full after 3 days of normal use.


Conclusion:

If anything, the biggest thing to note is the cool factor of the dual-slider design.  Not only does the phone look good, it performs perfectly as a pure messaging device. Texting can be pulled off a lot faster thanks to the QWERTY keyboard. The form factor and build quality of the Matrix is something to praise while not being a complete phone. Using the device for multimedia purposes might turn away some due to its mediocre performance. But then again, it’s all about the messaging.