Gadgetory

what's up everyone jon rettinger from technobuffalo here at a full review for you of the pantech element this is one of the new tablets that was announced by AT&T at CES 2012 and is now ready to be bought by your tablet loving hands there's a lot of competition in this 8-inch tablet range so let's go ahead and dig in and see if the elements is worth your tablet vayan dollar alright so let me run through the specs of the element to refresh your memory first the price is 299 the two-year contract there's also a deal going on you can get this with the Pantech Burst a 4G LTE smartphone for 249 dollars to get both them on a two-year contract this guy is running Android 3.2 presumably will see ice cream sandwich on it on the future but right now it is rock and honeycomb from dimension standpoint it's eight point three six inches by six point 12 inches by point 42 inches on the thinness were thickness I'd depending on who you ask well with not your glass half empty or half full kind of person and it weighs sixteen point five seven ounces what you are looking at this slab has an eight inch screen that's always measured diagonally with a resolution of 1024 x 768 and that is a TFT display and we'll talk about that display a little bit more as we go on battery it is a sealed 6,400 milliamp hour unit it's going to get you 12 hours of usage or 25 days on standby time it's being powered by a Qualcomm built 1.5 gigahertz processor and if you like to follow all the processors and your nerd like me it's the apq8064 man internal storage it's got 16 gigs expandable with microsd on the back of this guy boom we've got a 5 megapixel camera that lives right there that can shoot 720p video and you've got a front-facing haha 2 megapixel camera right there for front-facing stuff it's scott support for AT&T is expanding LTE network and Bluetooth 2.1 and it is named the element because it is actually waterproof this guy and it's not water resistant pantech is saying it is waterproof so stick around for a few minutes later into this review when things get a little more fun all right so let's talk about be design it looks like a tablet it's got a really nice feel to it the black plastic back in the way that's habit fault in the hand remind me a lot of the HTC touch pad it's extremely light tablet at sixteen point five ounces so you hardly even know that you're holding it I do like the eight-inch form factor as well generally I've been preferential to larger screen size tablets but this one really felt handy a nice especially well you know reading or browsing out of the web we'll talk about that a bit more later I do like the integrated speaker here on the side it was quite loud cameras again we'll talk about that kind of stuff because this is a waterproof tablet there's all kinds of sort of nuances here to be aware of so the power button here is almost a recessed we've got the sort of plastic ring around zip you gotta really push in all the ports here on the bottom where micro USB live hdmi out you can see them all right there and the SD card and sim card slot are all under this door so a lot of doors to do everything here 3.5 millimeter headset jack also wondered that door so if you live somewhere where it rains a lot or you like to browse the web wider in the pool or in the shower happy I might want to take a look at the element alright so let's talk briefly about some of the pantech tweaks and I've actually liked what pendek is done with android they really led Android the Android in this case they've let honeycomb be honeycomb with a few tweaks so you notice some stuff out really the buttons here are a little bit different they look they don't look like standard Android buttons the icons here look a little bit different as well the settings in the camera button a little bit different some of the stuff that they've done that I like if you go ahead and jump on into the camera and you will because I'm controlling it some things down here that can jump right into settings are quite nice so we'll go ahead and go back home nothing else overly exciting here the apps our pretty standard apps pantech has included a few things here that ATT's included as well so you've got a sketch pad you got a pc suite and you got some AT&T specific stuff but for the most part this is pretty stock honeycomb I'll show you what the widgets are that's generally where you see some differentiation not so pretty standard honeycomb which I like I don't like doodling up everything some other changes here you know some small stuff as far as how notifications look and are handled every time I use a honeycomb tab but not after using ice cream sandwich I keep trying to swipe stuff off to close it but to no avail alright so this is a tablet you're looking at the screen a lot you can spend a lot of time looking at this eight inch 1024 x 768 TFT display and unfortunately it's not going to be an overly enjoyable experience this is not a good screen I've tested a lot of tablets ranging in different prices this is probably one of the worst screens that I have tested so let me go ahead and show you and sort of going to be difficult to translate from camera things here are washed out text and because it's decent resolution it does look crisp but the screen itself the colors don't look vibrant the blacks don't look very black it's just not an enjoyable experience not to use now that might be due to the fact that it's waterproof so you gotta have a special type of glass on here it's got to be sealed all the way around the screen was actually so bad that I thought it might actually be a resistive touchscreen and I had to sort of test it with something that wasn't my finger to make sure that it wasn't so if we go ahead and look at galleries chloro scroll over here and I'll show you what you know some pictures look like so here are some sample pictures so these are sample pictures from pantex these are the best representations that they can show and cute dog really washed out the greens hardly look green the black on the dog just it just doesn't look nice and watching video it's about what you'd expect that same experience here's some sample video so the best of the best is the best it's supposed to look like just does not look nice and it doesn't look nice and the relative of other tablets so it's certainly washable you can watch a movie on it you can browse the web but knowing that it exists in the world of AMOLED screens this one just doesn't quite cut it unfortunately all right so let's talk about speed it's got a dual-core 1.5 gigahertz Snapdragon processor this has been a pretty zippy tablet actually screen complaints aside it's been really quick I didn't have to do any memory management it works well you know browsing was very smooth pinch-to-zoom worked very well LTE which just sort of just launched in Southern California so it's a bit spotty when it was working worked very well but everything about the the tablet from a speed standpoint it was quite pleasant so it was definitely a fast and capable tablet battery so you're going to have a giant battery 6400 milliamp hours and I was definitely able to get that 12 hours of use I use this guy well over a weekend so probably more than that 12 hours and I let it just play video and it lasted as advertised so you know that's positive generally there is a bit of fibbing when it comes to battery life but not so with pantech alright so let's get to the fun stuff this is a waterproof tablet and because it's a waterproof tablet it's got to be waterproof and I wouldn't be doing justice to you my audience if we didn't test how waterproof it was so let's go for a walk so let's say you're watching one of your favorite tech reviewers and you're strolling into your kitchen seeing what's going on in the world of technology and you know what you're thirsty you want something to drink you've had a long day you parched your little dry in the throat you want to go ahead and have a glass of water let's say refreshing I fooled you didn't I thought I was going to spill some water on it nope so I'm just using the tablet and uh oh sink full of water is it still playing the video look at that it is indeed still playing the video while completely submerged in water and it is indeed submerged pretty deep actually in water in the video still playing the tablet hasn't blown up still going let's see if I can use it while it's there so let's see if I can go ahead and tap the screen going to go back look like it wants to work do I can browse the web what's under there nope so you can't do anything with it but it will still work if you leave it so if you're watching a video or something waltz underwater it's still going to function let see if I take it out of the water if it works if it didn't just break it alright so let's pull a tablet out and you can see that it was submerged in water and peers to be working see if I can tap the screen screen they're gonna work with wet fingers I'm going to dry off my hands will come back in just a sec all right so the tablet survived the screen wasn't working on it was wet i had a dry it off and hit the power button I didn't have turned off i just had to lock it and then unlock it and we're back working again so this guy was submerged underwater and you know still working so you can see where we were left off in the video and everything is still sort of going buffering but tablet works it is a waterproof tablet i give pantech credit i definitely thought that I was going to have a broken tablet on my hands but pantech element is indeed waterproof and see it's still got water on it let's go ahead and finish up the review alright so we saw a lot of stuff with the pantech element it is indeed a waterproof tablet you can do whatever you need to do while you are under water if you like if you're in a radiant if you happen to drop your tablet in a puddle or you drop it in the toilet it's going to keep working I left you drop in a toilet you might want to rub it down with some Clorox you're still going to be able to use it for the price point of 299 there's a lot of tablets in that competition and that's to 99 with a two-year contract so granted you're getting LTE connectivity but this would not be the tablet I would want tethered to me for the next two years the screen is really the big reason for that it's just not enjoyable to use in a world of galaxy tabs and iPads this would not be the one that I would choose for my tablet buying dollar however if I was an outdoorsman I want to take the snowboarding and I somewhere where i needed that waterproof a bit of edge then the element would be something I would consider otherwise your best best to pass especially now when ice cream sandwich is readily becoming available it's tough to recommend a tablet that's not going to come with it right away so i'm jon rettinger from TechnoBuffalo hope you enjoyed my full review of the pantech element and i'll see you guys in the next video bye bye you