The Pantech Hotshot (free with a two-year contract) looks and feels a lot like a smartphone, but it's actually a feature?phone in disguise. It's thin and sleek, with decent call quality, good battery life, and a nice user interface hiding behind its touch screen. But all of that is pretty much negated by a processor that's just too slow. It could have been a contender, but it's more of a swing and a miss for this Hotshot.
Design and Call Quality
The Hotshot measures 4.7 by 2.4 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and weighs just 3.2 ounces. It's made entirely of plastic; the back is matte black with a diamond-textured pattern, while the front is a shiny, metallic red. There's a covered microUSB charging port on the right side of the phone, along with buttons to activate the phone's camera and voice dialing. The left side is home to volume control keys, as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack; this location makes it strange to hold the phone in your pocket while using headphones, since the cord sticks out to the side. Aside from that, there is just one multifunction button located beneath the phone's 3.2-inch 400-by-240-pixel capacitive display. That resolution is definitely on the low side, which makes fine details and text appear grainy. And while the phone's touch screen seems responsive, the processor makes everything feel slow; more on that in a bit.
The on-screen keyboard feels cramped, and similar to other touch screen Samsung feature phones, it only presents a virtual number pad in portrait mode. To type using a QWERTY keyboard, you must turn the phone sideways. The function button beneath the display mostly serves as a Home button. But press it twice, and it'll pull up a view of all three of the phone's home screens. Hold it down and it will show you your six most recent apps, then take you to whichever one you choose.
The Pantech Hotshot is a dual-band EV-DO Rev 0 (850/1900 MHz) device with no Wi-Fi. Voice quality is mostly good overall. Voices sound good in the phone's earpiece, but become distorted at higher volumes. On the other end, calls made with the phone sound clear but thin, with below average noise cancellation. Calls sounded fine through a Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars), and the Nuance-powered voice dialing worked well over Bluetooth. The speakerphone is loud enough to use outside, but sounds a bit distorted. Battery life was good at 6 hours and 55 minutes of talk time.
Processor and Apps
The biggest problem with the Hotshot is that everything feels far too sluggish and stiff. As I mentioned earlier, I don't think this is a fault of the touch screen; capacitive screens are used in plenty of responsive devices. I think the problem lies in the processor. The Hotshot is powered by a 480MHz ARM11 processor that just isn't up to the tasks its software demands of it. Swiping between each of the three home screens results in a noticeable delay. Ditto for launching apps, and pretty much any other function you can think of. It's frustrating having to wait so often, and it makes listening to music or watching video virtually impossible; if you try to do anything else on the phone at the same time, audio will frequently pause or cut out completely as the phone tries to keep up with you.
The Hotshot has an email app with access to Gmail, Hotmail, Microsoft Exchange, Verizon.net, Windows Live, and Yahoo accounts, but it requires that you have either a minimum data plan of $9.99 per month, or pay a $5 monthly subscription fee. Since the whole purpose of a feature phone is to save money, those prices are a bummer. The Opera Mini 5.1 browser does a nice job of delivering clean WAP and HTML pages. VZ Navigator 5.1 is available for clear, voice-enabled GPS directions for $9.99 per month extra. But between that and email, you're already half of the way towards a smartphone data plan. You also get all of the standard apps, like an alarm clock, calculator, calendar, notepad, and a stopwatch.
Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
For multimedia, you get 220MB of free internal memory, along with a 2GB microSD card. My 64GB SanDisk card worked fine as well. On the plus side, the Hotshot had no trouble finding my media, whereas many other Verizon feature phones require specific folders for each media type. The phone is able to play AAC, MP3, and WMA music files, but as previously mentioned, pops and skip abound, through either wired earbuds or Altec Lansing BackBeat?Bluetooth headphones ($129.99, 3.5 stars). If you're trying to listen to music and do something else at the same time, it becomes nearly unlistenable. And audio still cuts out periodically even when the phone remains otherwise untaxed. Additionally, sound quality via Bluetooth is too tinny to be enjoyable. This problems extends to video playback. The Hotshot plays H.264 and MPEG4 videos at resolutions up to 640-by-480, but suffers from periodic drops in audio.
The Hotshot's 3.2-megapixel camera lacks an LED flash and auto-focus. Shutter speeds are average, and test photos taken in areas with good lighting look reasonably sharp, though a touch blown out. Lower lighting caused motion blur and smudgey details. The camera can also record videos at 640-by-480-pixel resolution at 12 frames per second, but they look choppy and grainy.
The Pantech Hotshot could've been a solid feature phone, if not for that slow processor. As it stands, you're likely better off with the Samsung Brightside ($99.99) or the LG Extravert ($79.99). We haven't tested either phone yet, but both feature touch screens as well as physical keyboards, and we expect both to perform more responsively than the Hotshot. If you're willing to drop the touch screen, the Casio G'zOne Ravine 2?($179.99, 4 stars) is our favorite voice phone on Verizon, and is super rugged to boot, but it's a lot more expensive. The LG Cosmos 2?(Free, 3.5 stars) is another solid, affordable option for Verizon users that like to text but are looking to save money.
Benchmarks
Continuous talk time: 6 hours 55 minutes
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