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Pantech, a new entrant in the Indian mobile market has already created a little stir in the market with their debut line of GSM mobile phones. We decided to look at what they had to offer, and were pleasantly surprised. First off, we present the Pantech G500, a high-budget clamshell phone that boasts of an inbuilt camera with flash and a high-resolution display like no other. Let's see if it lives up to its claims. Package and Looks On opening the box you will find the main mobile unit, two batteries - one 780mAh Li-Ion battery, which is quite slim in size and the other 1000mAh Li-Ion battery, which is slightly bulkier than the former. Along with these, you will also find a mobile charger, data cable, mono headset for hands-free calls, a mini software CD and a thick manual. 
The G500 is basically a clamshell phone sized at 85 x 41 x 22 mm (closed) and weighing 90 g, which doesn't look too different from the others at first look. It has dual LCD screens one on top of the external clam and the second inside the top shell. Now usually, one expects the external screen to be a cheap quality monochrome LCD or even a QLED screen at the most, that's where this phone is different. Both the LCD screens (external and internal) are 260,000 color, high definition LCD screens. While the internal screen has a resolution of 128 x 160 pixels, the external screen itself boasts a 128 x 128 pixel resolution, which is as much as most phones boast on their main display LCDs. But it's not the size and the color support of the screen that makes it so amazing. The stellar screen clarity and crisp image quality are surely one of the best I've seen on a mobile unit. It's a joy to look at the screen, which is perfectly lit to the extent that even the smallest detail in images or the smallest text is clearly visible. It's a guarantee that heads will turn when you operate the phone in public, just because of its unmatched display. Besides the external LCD, the top shell also contains the inbuilt VGA camera with flash. The keypad is as usual present on the lower inner part of the phone. The keys are soft and extremely easy to use. The numeric keys are perfectly sized and spaced for convenience during single handed as well as double handed operation. When it comes to looks, the Pantech G500 can be quite a deceiver. It gives an impression of being "just another" clamshell phone when inactive; but as soon as you get it started, it doesn't fail to impress. 
Functionality The most innovative feature on the phone is the flash function for the camera, innovative, but also ineffective. The flash is made up of a bunch of white LEDs that spread out to slightly brighten the subject at a short distance. The problem is that if you're shooting in lowlight, the inbuilt CMOS camera is not good enough to notice the minute difference in lighting so the flash proves quite useless there. However, it does make a difference if you're planning to shoot nearby subjects in complete darkness, as that's where the flash is more prominent. The picture quality is just about standard for a camera phone. If you're expecting to be blown away by a CMOS VGA camera that's built in a phone then you would be in for a disappointment. Phone cameras are generally for fun photography, catching the random funny moments when you're out with your buddies, and for that this camera delivers. There are quite a few settings that you can adjust in the camera before you click, namely brightness presets, contrast, digital zoom (up to 4x), vertical and horizontal flip and image size. There's also a setting for taking 9 quick photos, in case you want to capture something in a sequence. One thing that the camera misses is a video recording function that most high-budget camera phones boast nowadays. The menu and interface of the phone complement the gorgeous LCD display. All sections of the menu have a slight animation (and a sound that gets annoying quickly but can be turned off), and take very little time to move back and forth without keeping the user on wait. Even the inbuilt game "Smokey" loaded up in a jiffy. Power users will find the menu shortcuts handy to get to their favourite tasks in no time. The biggest downside of the phone is that the preinstalled applications and utilities are tremendously generic. The list of applications includes the regular organizer alarm clock, stopwatch, etc. Now this list would not really be a problem for regular phones, but for a high-end phone this is a pretty big drawback. The G500 supports GPRS and comes with a data cable for connectivity. It, however, has no support for Bluetooth and Infrared, which is another negative considering that this is a high-end camera phone. It supports messaging in forms of SMS, MMS and EMS. The voice clarity of G500 is very loud and clear. However, the network coverage left a bit to be desired, as there was voice break-up even on zones where other phones seemed to work flawlessly. However, I would still rate the overall network reception and voice clarity as quite good. The 1000mAh battery worked through 3 days with regular phone and camera usage, which is pretty good, considering how much battery the dual display and the flash would be using. Conclusion Available at your friendly neighborhood street shop for close to Rs. 19,000, it may be a bit too pricey for its features. But then there are a few gizmos that you don't mind paying extra for a little bit of eye candy, and fun features. The G500 doesn't have any major issues to bring it down, but it doesn't even have much to separate it from the phones that come for much less. So in the end I give you a good camera phone with an excellent display, at a price that may be out of reach for a lot of people. If the display matters so much to you, might as well shell out that little extra for a phone that will more than satisfy, else wait a while till the price drops a bit. Test Unit Sourced From: First Mobile India Private Ltd., Mumbai.
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