Reviews of new phones are nearly pointless. What you really want is a review of the phone after it has been used for months or years. Here are comments after using the Pantech Breeze II for nearly two years. The new version, the Pantech III is nearly identical. I was in the market for a new phone after the original Pantech was lost.
You can read about my reasons for buying a new phone in this article:
Keyliner Cellphone Thoughts
A quick Review of the now-lost Pantech Breeze II:
Overall look and feel:
The phone has a nice feel and is comfortable to hold with sculpted corners and a sleek design. It feels solid and well-built. Buttons are well-built and well designed -- it is not a chicklett keyboard. Voice-dialing has a dedicated button, which is nice, and the three speed-dial buttons, found on the flip, are actually useful.
When unfolded, the phone is thin with a wonderfully thin screen. However, when folded, it is about the same thickness as most other phones. I could imagine it being thinner (I always think of the Razor).
The screen quality is nice; good colors, good separation but the hinge is a little weak and after two years, this is the component that started to fail.
Even though this is a simple flip-phone, I have liked it enough to consider purchasing it again and that decision will be made later today.
Problems:
A recent problem, after a year and a half, the phone's screen does not turn on when flipped. If I jiggle the screen or wait about 5 seconds, it would slowly appear. I suspect the ribbon cable underneath has worn and this is a relatively new problem. If I find the lost phone, I'll take it apart and look at this. This may indicate a design flaw and the Breeze III should have similar problems as the phone ages.
The T9 texting keyboard, with the dictionary turned on, worked well, but you can't add your own words and you can't change the order of some commonly-used pop-up words. Overall, I liked the feature. There was one bug in some typed-messages (but not others), where you could not select a lower-case-"i" -- only a lower-cased "el" was offered. Most of the time, the "i" worked properly.
Voice Recognition:
Voice Recognition (dialing) was surprisingly useful and I liked having it, however, it only works for dialing, not for texting. The voice recognition was fairly good - as long as there was no background talking-noises, such as a radio. Sometimes the voice recognition would use the speaker-phone and other times it would use the internal speaker/mic. I could never predict when it would choose one style over the other. In practice, this was not a big deal.
Voice-dialing has a dedicated button on the keypad. Many reviews have faulted this as wasted space, but I like the button.
Phone Menus:
The phone's internal menus have some features hidden in menus 3 or 4 layers deep and I often got lost, with some menu choices in seemingly-bizarre places. Admittedly, you only need these occasionally -- but it appears to have been organized somewhat randomly.
The phone has a "Breeze" menu and an "Advanced" menu. The Breeze menu hides all of the complicated functions and presents a simplified menu. Although the Breeze menu was adjustable (you can control which features appear), not all advanced features could be put on the Breeze. For example, I would like to be able to turn on and off the BlueTooth using Breeze Menu, but I could not attach it. For this reason, I always had to use the advanced menu.
BlueTooth could not be turned on in mid-call. I wished it could. If I needed to use the remote mic, I had to hang up on the call, engage the feature, then re-dial the phone. This may be normal with all phones.
Features, such as Ring-tones, wallpaper settings, etc., were relatively easy to select. But the Wallpaper was troublesome -- there was no way to disable the feature (say you wanted a simple blank screen).
Phone Charger / USB Cable
The Pantech II used a proprietary charging plug and a proprietary USB cable. I understand the new model uses the new industry standard charger and you can, for example, use your Nook or Kindle charger to power the phone. Finally.
Related to this, the old version had a proprietary USB cable, which did not come with the phone and was devilishly-hard to find at a reasonable price. With the USB cable, and Pantech's downloadable Windows software (free), you could type entries directly into the phone book from the computer and you could download your recorded photos and videos. But the software's address-book was horribly flawed -- it would not allow you to select whether a phone number was "work", "home", "mobile-1", etc. and by the time it arrived on the phone, you could not tell one number from the next.
Also, with the USB cable, the Pantech II did not appear as a standard USB drive on the computer. This is a sad oversight and would make using the phone much nicer. (Update: a MicrosSD card would change this behavior, but I was expecting the internal memory to be visible to the computer, but it was not.)
Camera and Video:
The phone's camera is 1.5mpx and the quality is poor. In practice, I never used either the camera or the video. Reasoning: It's a flip-phone and people who use flip-phones can't possibly care.
The micro-SD card is hidden underneath the battery, making it unusable. This is why you want the USB cable.
There is no MP3 music feature.
External:
If you want ear-buds or a wired mic, there will be no such luck. There is no standard jack for these features and a wired mic was not made for the proprietary port. The phone was expecting you to use only Blue Tooth. In retrospect, this has been a big shortcoming with this phone. A wired boom mic is so much nicer than Bluetooth and I would really like one on this phone. It makes desk-work (working on a computer while talking on the phone) so much nicer. BlueTooth has too many faults.
Final Thoughts:
This is a flip-phone with no expectations of greatness. But the phone, as designed, is a good, quality device that feels solid and professional. Definitely not a cheap, disposable phone. Despite the complaints above, I had every intention of buying the new version.
Pantech P7040P Replacement
But, after pondering at the store, I decided to replace the phone with a keyboard so texting is easier. My daughter said she was tired of getting one-word texts from me and it was time to move up in the world. If it were not for the texting, I would have definitely bought a the original Panetech again.
Cons:
- No voice recognition
- Does not connect to ATT's Online Address Book (despite what the manual said). This meant I had to re-type all of my addresses manually.
- Same proprietary power-jack as the flip-phone
- No external headphone or microphone jack; an adapter is available via 3rd party.
- Optional (free) PC-based software (for data-entry) is still flawed and useless.
- Battery-life is not nearly as good as the flip phone, normally about 3 days use on a charge.
- Not as comfortable to hold as the flip-phone. It is like talking on a Hershey bar.
- Surfing the net with the built-in browser, on the larger screen, using the 3G network was an exercise in frustration and patience. This is not the phone to use for these tasks, nor is it sold as such a device. But it is "capable" (in quotes), not recommended.
Pros:
- Remarkably thin, 9mm.
- Larger, brighter screen
- The keyboard is obviously better than a T9 keyboard.
- It comes with a built-in music player (not tested, pointless without ear-buds).
- The micro-sd card slot is more accessible.
- When connected to a computer with the optional (proprietary) USB cable, the phone appears as a disk-drive (needs MicroSD card).
I've now used this phone long enough to know I like it. It certainly looks more trendy than a flip-phone. I'm pleased with the change. However, I still like the flip-phone
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Keyliner Cellphone Thoughts
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