Camera Phones Plaza

Yesterday Pantech and AT&T announced the Korean company’s latest flip phone, C610, which will become one of AT&T’s best equipped budget phones. Usually, thinking about high-end feature phones, Pantech doesn’t normally come to mind, because most Pantech handsets are of the lower-end variety. Nevertheless, the new C610 it’s a bit of a surprise. If at first glance, you can easily mistake it for some other flip phone, underneath its outer outfit there’s a fine device, a high-speed multimedia handset, equipped with advanced technologies such as HSDPA and GPS.



At the present, every phone manufacturer is caught in the middle of the fight for the next best smartphone. In the meantime, AT&T decided to improve the lower end of its phone offerings, so it introduced the Pantech C610, a phone boasting a wide variety of features that one can usually find on expensive phones.

The minimalist phone has a vibrant red hue and shiny chrome accents, and therefore a pretty minimalist design. It measures 3.67 x 1.81 x 0.72 and weighs 3.25 ounces, so it feels very lightweight when carrying it in your pocket. On the front, you can easily see the camera lens, placed at the top, and the 1-inch external display which supports 65,000 colors, which can be used for photo caller ID. The camera can’t be activated when the phone is closed, so if you’re the narcissist type of guy, you’ll have to open the phone for self-portraits.



When you open the phone, you’ll find a 2.0-inches display with a resolution of 1280 x 1040 pixels. There is an option for you to adjust the backlight timer, the brightness, the font style (Gothic or Free style), the color theme and the menu type (List or Grid), but one thing that can’t be modified is the font size.

The navigation array is quite annoying because the keys are completely flat and certain buttons (take the Clear key or the arrow keys for examples) are a little too small. A great disadvantage is the fact that the keys are not very visible, as there’s no delineation, while the keypad itself is crowded. And you know how irritating it is for one to not be able to properly dial and text.



The Pantech C610 has a 500-entry address book and for each entry there is enough room for five different numbers, two e-mail addresses, a Web URL, a street address and a memo. If you want, you can arrange contacts by groups and pair them with a photo or one of the 10 polyphonic ring tones especially designed for caller ID. In addition, the phone features text and multimedia messaging, a vibrate mode, a speakerphone, a calendar, an alarm clock, a notepad, a calculator, a tasks list, a stop watch and a unit converter. But these are usual features for phones nowadays, so you might get excited about the voice-command support, the voice-memo recording, a mobile Web browser, e-mail support (for Yahoo, AOL, AIM, Windows Live, AT&T Yahoo and BellSouth accounts), instant messaging (AIM, Windows Live and Yahoo Messenger), stereo Bluetooth and GPS support (via AT&T Navigator).



The most important feature of the Pantech C610 is that it has 3G/HSDPA, which facilitates the the access to AT&T’s 3G services. Therefore, you can enjoy AT&T Mobile Music (letting you stream and download music from Napster and eMusic), AT&T streaming video and AT&T Video Share. The AT&T Video Share is a live video-sharing service that lets you stream one-way video to another Video Share-compatible phone.

As far as the music is concerned, the C610 has an integrated music player and supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, MMF and WAV audio formats. The phone comes with an internal memory of only 12MB, but there’s a microSD-card slot to additional storage (of up to 4GB).

The pictures can be taken by the 1.3 megapixel camera in six different resolutions (1280 x 1024, 1024 x 768, 640 x 480, 320 x 240, 176 x 220 and 176 x 144); there are four white-balance settings, four color effects and three quality settings, while other camera features consist of a self-timer, a timer-sound toggle and a shutter-sound toggle.

The Pantech C610 provides of up to 3 hours of talk time and up to 10 days of standby time and it’s immediately available from AT&T for $49 with a two-year contract, making it one of the most affordable 3G phones around.

(Source news.cnet.com)