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Pantech Discover Review

2013-01-21
what's up everyone jon rettinger from technobuffalo here at the 40 of you for you of the pantech discover this is a really nicely SPECT mid-range phone and offers a lot of bang for the phone buying buck let's go ahead put it through its paces see if it's worth your hard-earned money alright so here is the pantech discover we're gonna break this review down into a few different parts we're gonna talk about call quality hardware build quality display performance software battery life and then give this sucker a full review doesn't really matter what's powering this phone if it's not going to make good phone calls it's not gonna be that much he used to you call quality is with most modern smartphones now was actually pretty good my 20 call test I didn't have any dropped calls I had no white noise and a call on the other ends had a hard time telling i was on a cell phone that does have some cool 3d ask speakerphone ability it's one actually one of the best speaker phones that i've tried so don't worry about getting the pantech discover for call quality it's going to work great signal strength when it came to LTE and HSPA+ is on par with almost every other AT&T phone i've tested something notable either great or negative one way to report there alright so let's run through the hardware this guy it's packing some pretty premium esque specs so first it's got a four point eight inch LCD screen at the resolution of 1280 by 720 that's going to give it 306 ppi it's running android 4.4 they've been powered by 1.5 gigahertz dual-core chip gig of ram 16 gigs of internal storage expandable via microsd it's got a pretty beefy 12.6 megapixel camera on the back we'll talk a little bit about camera as we get there 2 megapixel shooter on the front Wi-Fi is the dow pretty standard 802 11 b g and n 20 100 million of our battery it's got NFC on it as well it's going to weigh at 4.7 six ounces and overall it's a pretty nice package a little bit of a different design here on the side I was designed that I wasn't fond of on first blush it's got these two giant chunky corners here on the top of left and top right but actually fattens be really useful to pull the phone out of my pocket if I put the phone in face-up is really easy to grab these and pull it right out several people notice the sort of had a nexus feel to it pantech has really nailed the build quality here it's a fantastic feeling phone with a bit of an odd design so it's flat in the middle then a hump on the top and a hump on the bottom and then curved edges on the side display is also curved on both sides of one we'll talk about that in the next category they really done an incredible job to build claw here if you were worried about picking up a pantech because you've used maybe one of their lower end models I don't let build quality a reason to deter you this phone feels excellent the volume rocker up and down have a really nice push through it nothing on a comment on very often but these felt great the power and lock buttons really well pronounced everything about the phone I actually a screen pretty premium build quality so hats off to pantech for that the other major important thing about a phone though is the display and this is where the phone starts to fall a bit short so I mentioned we got a resolution here of 1280 by 720 perfectly suitable screen and pretty commonplace what we see on most mid to high-end phones but we soon take this phone outside or you hold it at a slight angle the viewing angle makes this thing almost impossible to view even at a slight off angle if you're viewing a website for example I could have a really hard time seeing anything images were relatively washed out here as well and video just looked kind of blob tested a lot of phones over the years and this one was really unremarkable in almost every ways from a display stand point this isn't definitely not one of the better phones all rights go from displayed to performance this guy's being powered by a dual-core 1.5 gigahertz processor it's a Snapdragon ID and sometimes it feels pretty snappy sometimes it doesn't for those you quadrant nuts out there to get a pretty solid quadrant score 5551 but sometimes launching web applications or really any applications there was a huge lag so for example right now I'll close everything that I had opened up here one out of every five or six times when I go ahead and try and open the web and I tap touch the browser between the time that the keyboard showed up sometimes was very quick like you just saw in sometimes towards a maybe a five to six second delay now injury representative of throughout the phone sometimes things were very fast and they were they worked really well but it wasn't consistent throughout the entire experience of the phone that I might be due to some third party after I tried not being coated the best but you're not going to be using just first party google apps as use the phone something to keep in mind if you're looking for really the fastest phone out there this is definitely not going to be for you but when it comes to doing stuff once it's open you know browsing and things are just as as you'd expect pinch-to-zoom work just as you'd expect everything else about it you know just works like a regular Android phone albeit not the fastest one out there alright let's talk about software pentax done quite a bit of twiki and customizing to the android 4.0 point for that it's built on so first let's talk about this launcher down here the first thing i do when i start using a new android phone is all pretty much download on nova launcher it's a custom launcher this one is very similar i love that stock out of the box get the option to scroll and place more shortcuts and folders here on the bottom if you choose if the irregular 5 here is enough for you so i really like that pantech has done that i like they've opted for the soft buttons as opposed to physical capacitive buttons at the bottom so hats off to them as well but things get a little bit cartoonish throughout the phone much more cartoonish even than Samsung's already sort of almost childish looking touch with look at the phone for example go ahead and see what the dialer looks like icons are very big bold and bright and that's certainly a personal preference that's not my favorite but something to bear in mind authentic ascents with cool stuff here well when it comes to picking widgets so as opposed to stock ice cream sandwich when you want to get widgets and go to apps and go to widgets which are narrowly be living up there that's not where they are if you long press this is sort of old-school Android you get a whole bunch of options for you can pick the pick from I love that settings is right there and easy to grab and go ahead and grab widgets the icons show up right here on the bottom you can see about as much as you can on the regular version of Android but you get a smaller preview if there's some cool animations to as you scroll through I didn't mind this very much but it's something to sort of relearn if you use previous versions of Android phones thus we have to go for widgets sort of other niceties here as well on the drop down you've got some colors here in the quick set go ahead and scroll that guy back up when you're in the browser for example as well you get a little drawer you could pull up and go and pick up some of your most used book works found to be actually really useful feature overall though I really didn't mind the tweaks that pantech had done in fact a fan to be one of the more useful it didn't appear to be overly resource heavy either which is quite nice I would have really liked to have had android 4.1 in here and had the awesome new google search in google now but that is not to be had hopefully at some point though this phone will get that upgrade alright so let's talk about battery life this is a 2100 milliamp hour battery and it wasn't half bad actually I was able to get through easily a full day of weekend use with about two hours a phone call some admittedly very intensive Twitter Instagram and Facebook use and a lot of browsing about 15-20 minutes of video with about forty percent of battery life so despite not being the largest battery in the world it really did a nice job when it came down to how long the battery could last and the use of the juice that it had worked actually very very well so battery life was definitely thumbs up for this phone so what's the final verdict on the pantech discover it's not a bad phone may fetch the imaginations at fifty dollars is a pretty nice value we look at phones that are maybe fifty dollars to a hundred dollars more and starts being tough to justify this certainly saving a couple bucks up front is nice over the course of a 2500 $3,000 two-year contract at fifty bucks savings doesn't mean that much 18 he's got a lot of great phones in this lineup the optimus G the HTC One x+ iphone 5 Lumia 920 HSE a 28 x name a few all of which were thin that fifty to a hundred dollars difference in price becomes tough to figure out why you would go and get this phone I give pantech credit for trying to get out of that sort of submarket free phone brand and try and get to that premium standing and they've done a relatively nice job I would have liked the screen to be improved and performance me a little bit zippier another hand though I like their tweaks that they've done the software wise and I like to build quality and these two little humps on the side I really started to grow on me so this is by no means a perfect phone but by no means a bad phone either I'm looking to get a budget phone with some pretty preemie spec's the pantech discover is going to be great choice for you overall this gets a 7.5 on the TechnoBuffalo scale what do you guys think do you guys agree disagree i'd love to hear your thoughts i'm jon rettinger from TechnoBuffalo and i'll see you guys next video you
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