Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minimun from pocketnow.com and this is the software toward the AT&T pantech matrix pro also known as the successor to the old pantech duo and as i use this device more and more I'm beginning to like it and and this is why yes it has a very thick design but the rounded edges and the very smooth surfaces makes for a really comfortable in hand experience when you take it out of your phone it looks good when you rest it on the table once you get past the thickness it looks really nice very Sheen it's a nice break from kind of the harder edges that you find on devices like the HTC touch pro and that sort of thing also the slider mechanism has a function whereas on the old pantech duo of slider did nothing for example it does two things really you can answer calls and end calls by opening the slider which is very convenient because it extends the phone and it makes it more comfortable in hand and number two it will actually unlock the keypad and it will lock the keypad so if you slide the slider up after you're done using it after the screen turns off the device will automatically lock and this is really great so that you don't accidentally call people while the phones in your pocket but when you want to quickly use it you take it out you slide it either way and you will get the screen to unlock now something I want to mention before I get into any of this is screen rotation speed because that's very important you don't want to rotate your screen and the screen is still stuck in the portrait orientation so let's take a look at how it compares to the original pantech duo and then we'll talk about how it compares to other devices so here we are on the same screen and let's give it a try ok so the matrix pro is a little faster although it is a little faster than the pantech duo it's still a little bit slow and it's not as fast as a device like the HTC touch pro or even the htcs 743 and that's a bit of a problem that said they didn't create the processor speed on this new unit and as you'll see throughout this demonstration screens come up pretty fast it's got really fast performance which is pretty refreshing ok so the matrix pro is several home screens to choose from and what we have here is the standard windows mobile 6.1 sliding panel interface and we have a little spring background here we've seen this many times before you can see your next appointment you can quickly add a new appointment you can go to your text messages in your email it's a really nice interface but let me show you what else you can load on to the home screen so I'm going to start and then I'm going to go into settings and home screen and let's change it to the launcher ok this is what the launcher looks like and it's kind of a new style design I don't like it very much what you do is you press the down arrow and then you can filter through your messages you can filter through your email calendar so it's kind of like the same concept as a sliding panel so you have everything in one place but it's it's slow it's chunky doesn't look that good you can't really customize it and so I i revert back to the sliding panel interface ok and this is the default sliding panel interface and it actually has a little bit of AT&T branded stuff which is why I turned it off so we go down to a TNT Express Mail you can start express mail and then that's pretty much the only added part to the default interface so let's go into the start menu and see what kind of programs we have on the device and I'm going to go into all programs and let's go landscape for the demonstration so here we have the standard stuff messaging calendar contacts that sort of thing we have a lot of AT&T branded stuff like cellular video media net medium all really a bunch of junk that that is is really annoying to have on here if we go to my stuff it's a file explorer this comes with a really good messenger program it so z messenger and it lets you access aim and yahoo and live messenger which is great click the back button and to the right of that we've mobitv and for those of you that don't know mobitv actually lets you watch live TV on your device it's great but the trouble with it is that it costs I think it's five dollars a month or maybe even a little bit more than that but right now i'm running a demo and let me show you it your trial is expired so i can't even use it i spent you know about two minutes watching TV and it's already expired it costs ten dollars to buy the unlimited and we can kind of get in there and see the interface so it's a really nice-looking way to browse through channels and they have a lot of good channels and by the way most AT&T devices come with this by now so this isn't unique to the matrix pro and i can't do anything because my trials expired so let's go back okay so we have AT&T gps although you can use google maps mobile or windows live search if you want to use a location-based service which i recommend you do we have the full suite of office mobile applications which is great if we go over to organizer we have a standard alarm calculator notepad world-time voice notes so that you can record some notes that you have along the way so really basic tools that they include we have games and there's several games added but every one of them except for bubble breaker and solitaire is java based trial where and that's a big sticking point that i have with AT&T devices they come with a lot of trial where stuff that you can't use unless you pay for it and that's really annoying i mean you spend the money to buy the device you would think they would include some nice games with it but unfortunately that's not the case going down we have a another button for applications and here we have the camera and actually the camera interface is quite good and we'll talk about photo quality coming up in the review i'll show you why the camera interface is quite good so right now it's black because i'm sitting on a desk but if i go to options and i go to settings this is how i change the settings it's really easy and it's it's really easy to use the icons to see what you're changing and you can just go up and down to change to normal quality or high quality change the resolution unfortunately the camera doesn't have auto focus or a flash which may impede photo quality again we're going to talk about that in the review coming up on pocketnow.com we have filed explorer java a way to view pdfs we have system info which will tell you you know the cpu speed and things like that speed dial more programs voice commander which will let you speak to your device without having to train it and let's go back to the previous screen we have settings nothing terribly interesting in there you have the ability to shut off the setting for answering a call when you slide open the keypad you also have a setting for turning on and off the device lock when you slide on an open and close the keypad going down skyfire is something that I've added we have Bluetooth explorer and then we've remote desktop which is kind of surprising that this device comes with remote desktop because the screen is so small and so rate low resolution you'd probably wonder is it even usable on a device like this again right now I'm logged into my windows vista machine with remote desktop and it's somewhat usable you have a cursor that you can move around on the screen and you get a little box in the corner that shows you where you are in relation to the whole screen so if I click on start the Start menu will work so this may be useful for doing very very light tasks like retrieving a document or finding the phone number that you have listed on your device but but I wouldn't expect to use it for typing documents or checking email but it's good that they include it on on the pantech matrix pro anyway so overall I think the pantech matrix pro is a really good messaging device probably not for the professional who wants the best of the best with really good email and messaging features it's a very basic device but it does well at what it sets out to do which is to be a good communicator with a nice sense of style and two ways to enter in text the slider and the party keyboard if you're on AT&T right now I think the fuse would be a better choice if you're a professional when you want something more robust that said we've got the full review coming up on pocket now calm and we're going to talk about battery life and talk about all the kinds of the devices and come out with a conclusion at the end so that's it for now