Pantech C630 User Reviews

Paul
posted on 10 Feb 2009, 02:15

3.7

Bad sound quality, lots of software bugs -- Score: 3/10

  I do not like the C630 *at all*. I would give it two stars out of five. This is an overview of why the phone is poor. AT&T did a very poor job to release such a low-quality phone that *appears* in specifications to be nice, but in reality is not of high quality. GPS is not important when hearing the caller does not work...  The sound quality is diastrous; very garbled and muddy. I switched to this phone from the Nokia 610 (a five year old phone), and even with full bars (I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area) I can often barely hear what a person has to say.  There are also way too many dropped calls; they occur on most of my phonecalls with full bars, especially when dialing: the phone starts to dial, then immediately disconnects without warning and just exits back to the main screen. So there I am, the phone to my ear, not knowing that it's not dialing...then after a few seconds I look back and see that it's back to the main screen, and there is no activity, nor message of a terminated call. It's as if I simply never even dialed.  There are simply too many bugs: as an example, often "Emergency Call Only" mode is activated when I have full bars, and it simply won't allow any phonecalls to be placed. The phone has to be turned off, then on again, to get it to work.  Many times accessing normal menu features (such as "Profiles") causes the phone to display "Invalid Card" for no reason, and then it exits back to the main screen. Or in the middle...  

  I do not like the C630 *at all*. I would give it two stars out of five. This is an overview of why the phone is poor. AT&T did a very poor job to release such a low-quality phone that *appears* in specifications to be nice, but in reality is not of high quality. GPS is not important when hearing the caller does not work...  The sound quality is diastrous; very garbled and muddy. I switched to this phone from the Nokia 610 (a five year old phone), and even with full bars (I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area) I can often barely hear what a person has to say.  There are also way too many dropped calls; they occur on most of my phonecalls with full bars, especially when dialing: the phone starts to dial, then immediately disconnects without warning and just exits back to the main screen. So there I am, the phone to my ear, not knowing that it's not dialing...then after a few seconds I look back and see that it's back to the main screen, and there is no activity, nor message of a terminated call. It's as if I simply never even dialed.  There are simply too many bugs: as an example, often "Emergency Call Only" mode is activated when I have full bars, and it simply won't allow any phonecalls to be placed. The phone has to be turned off, then on again, to get it to work.  Many times accessing normal menu features (such as "Profiles") causes the phone to display "Invalid Card" for no reason, and then it exits back to the main screen. Or in the middle of just navigating through the menus using the joystick can cause this error to terminate whatever you were doing. Very frustrating.  Often the alarm simply deactivates itself randomly--before the alarm has a chance to go off. I've verified the night before that an alarm is set, but in the morning...nothing: it's set to "Off", sometimes even when I check it before the alarm time. Hence it is not me sleeping through it or turning it off.  Many useful features are buried in several, counter-intuitive menus. Want to see the Recent Calls list? First enter the Main Menu, then use the little joystick to navigate to My Stuff, then select *Tools and Utilities* of all things, then finally Recent Calls. That's 4-levels deep for what should be near the top layer.  The battery life is also pretty poor when using a Bluetooth headset; it has to be recharged every day after about an hour of talk. Also, the bluetooth strength is very weak: if I place the phone in my pants pocket opposite the side I'm wearing the headset on, the reception is very static-like and unclear: this is two feet away from the headset, and my body already blocks most of the signal.  The instruction manual does not discuss the relevant menus, only silly things like GPS navigator, etc., not intructions on how to set up some of the most basic settings on the phone. Nor does it explain why any of the random error messages (see above) might occur.  The power connector is fragile and awkward to insert. The small rubber cover is tricky to remove enough to insert the connector, as it keeps swinging back and getting pinched between the phone and connector. This portion of the design was not thought out.
  Overall, a pretty bad phone that is frustrating, awkward, and annoying to use.

Design 2/10

Features 7/10

Performance 2/10

Pros

• Nice camera and video camera modes, nice screen.

Cons

• Call quality is garbled and muddy, lots of software bugs, awkward user interface, frequent random drops on the 3G network, and the list goes on.