Review: Pantech Ease
Messaging on the Pantech Ease is adequate, but it could be much better. The phone is built to be a simple messaging device, and Pantech has taken the trouble to build a custom interface, so I'm wondering why the messaging features were not improved. Even worse, SMS messaging, which will easily be the most popular feature on the Ease, lags behind even AT&T's quick messaging phones.
To start, you open the keyboard and press the large "Create Message" button, one of only four buttons on screen in the landscape menu. When you want to enter a contact, you cannot perform a proper search from the recipient field. The phone presents a list of contacts, but you can only tap a letter to jump to the contact you want to select. This is even less useful than the main phonebook. Messages are shown individually, not in the threaded, conversational format that I prefer. It's not that the phone can't handle threaded messaging, but in Easy Mode, the feature is not available. It's the default in Advanced Mode, as if threaded messaging doesn't make reading text messages much easier and more simple. Easy Mode apparently means "Phone From 5 Years Ago Mode."
The Pantech Ease gets the standard AT&T Mobile Email app, so you can check your Gmail, Hotmail, AOL mail or mail from any other POP3 or IMAP4 provider. Unfortunately, this app costs an extra $5 per month to use on top of any data charges. Folks like my parents, saving for their retirement, are probably looking to avoid these extra charges, which is a good reason why they would choose a simpler device over a smartphone. For AT&T to bilk them out of extra cash for a service that should be free is ridiculous.
That's all for messaging. The phone supports IM for AOL, MSN and Yahoo, but only if you switch to Advanced Mode. There's also that Social Net app to check status updates on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, but again, that's unavailable in Easy Mode. Perhaps this crowd doesn't use IM so much, but the Social Net app is a simple, convenient way to check updates, without too much fuss and frills. It should have been included on the Easy side.
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Pantech Pursuit
