Gadgetory

well this is David with the verge and this is the pantech element it's an AT&T tablet you can buy it with or without a contract but either way you're going to be paying 80 for a data plan hardware-wise it's a pretty average honeycomb tablet it's not the finished we've ever seen but it's certainly not particularly thick and it's tapered nicely so that it's actually pretty easy to hold it's really glossy on the back so it picks up fingerprints and scratches pretty easily but that's pretty standard to a lot of phones we've seen it actually feels just like a blown-up smartphone has a sim card slot and a microSD card slot along with micro USB and micro HDMI they're all covered by these sort of annoying flaps but there's a reason for them it's got volume and power controls right up at the top next to each other you're definitely meant to hold this tablet in landscape mode it's a 43 aspect ratio and it's an 8 inch display it's a TFT display and generally it's fine it's not as good as some of the ones we've seen it's only 1024 x 768 resolution and some small text is hard to read and it's a little it has some jaggies on the display but for the most part it gets the job done fine one of the best things about the element is actually the speaker most tablets have speakers that either go out the side or at the back so audio is always being pushed away from you but the element is actually the speaker's right on the front so even though it's not the loudest speaker it actually works really well because it's blasting the sound directly at your face as you looking there are two cameras on the element there's a 2-megapixel front-facing camera and a 5 megapixel camera on the back the back camera takes decent pictures but it's pretty much the same as every other tablet the camera is also a little slow and it can take like a couple seconds to autofocus before it actually takes a shot the front-facing camera is actually kind of terrible it's a two megapixel camera which is more than most that you see on tablets but it's located off to the side here so it's kind of hard to frame whatever you're trying to get in the photo since it's located in such as odd spot you're definitely meant to use it in portrait mode which works a little better but this isn't really how you'd want to be shooting photos the element runs Android 3.2 honeycomb and it performs pretty much like every other honeycomb tablet we've seen the operating system has some definite issues with bugginess and sluggishness and some things just occasionally not working at all as they should but it's certainly no worse on the element than any device I've used the browser on the other hand is is actually worse than a lot of honeycomb tablets we've seen it has trouble rendering fonts and stuff so sites will look a little different than you expect them to and it also does this thing where it will it'll load about eighty percent of the page without showing anything actually on the display and then all at once we'll just load the entire page so it looks like it's frozen before it loads every single page which is just kind of strange generally the element is as I said just like most other honeycomb tablets but there are a couple of things that set it apart a little bit it runs on AT&T LTE network there's also a piezo actuator inside the element which gives it a little bit of haptic feedback for virtually every action every time you swipe home screens or do much of anything it gives you a list a little bit of vibration to let you know that you did something and it's designed to be kind of a more immersive experience to make it feel like something is happening and generally speaking like in a game it's it's a neat trick because it actually feels like you're hitting the pinball when you're hitting the pinball but otherwise it's it's kind of jarring it actually makes it feel like there's a hard drive worrying inside the element which is not exactly what you want from your tablet overall it's pretty much just like every other honeycomb tablet we've tested it has some serious performance issues that we're hoping an Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade will solve but generally it's pretty much the same except for this it's waterproof it's rated ip57 which means it can sit in up to a metre of water for up to 30 minutes but it becomes pretty unusable as soon as it's wet you can't really do much and often drops of water will actually press buttons so the screen just becomes kind of chaotic so you can't exactly like read in the bathtub but you can certainly drop it in the bathtub and not really worry about it at two hundred ninety nine dollars with a contract or 449 without one there's really no reason to recommend the pantech element ATT's data plans get expensive quickly and there's really nothing about the elements hardware or software that makes it any better than any of its competitors from the kindle fire all the way up to the ipad