Pantech C300 user reviews (AT&T)

Pros Size, features, did I say size?

Cons Address book options, out-of-the-box ringtones, text saving options

Summary Yes, it's small -- hello that's the point. Not for bit masculine hands but for small hands, it's dreamy. Also, small phone so easy to fit into a purse.

It is a phone. that's it. Good for talking and texting and the photos are cute. Really, the phone is adorable.

Here's what's struck me so far on the phone, and for the record, I'm a long time Nokia user:

1) Address book. It's one number per contact, so now I have John Cell, John Work, John Home. Before I had John, and three numbers associated with his name plus notes and an address. Not available here.
2) Texts. Texting is easy, love it ... but, you can't archive the texts. There's just an in-box and an out-box. So, all my saved texts, archived stuff has no where to go.

So, I love the size and the functionality. Find it very easy to use (small hands), just wish the address book and text features were a bit more advanced. If you don't need that and you have small hands, this is a beautiful phone. You should purchase a ringtone or two to remove to awful out of the box tone.

Pros Quality construction, simple operation, great form factor.

Cons GSM phone systems lacking in remote areas.

Summary Being most familiar with the standard makes like Nokia and Motorola I had my doubts about something called Pantech. As it happens though Pantech has been around for a few years and is a real up-and-coming cell phone manufacturer that clearly has some talented engineers and designers.
I don't understand how CNET's review can state that the small size of this phone with be a turn off to "many". I thought THAT was the whole point--small is good! This phone would be a great companion to the MobiBlu one cubic inch mp3 player. Both work great look great and any smaller and they'd be unusable.
I can not imagine how this will be topped and I just hope it won't become technically obsolete. Even with poor hearing and eye sight due to age I find the C300 performance startlingly good. It would be worth the price just for the camera and other "extras".

Pros Small, light, good sound quality on both ends

Cons Speaker phone a little distorted, can't add to dictionary of predictive text

Summary Wow, so I picked this up to see how it fared because I needed a new cell phone and it looked cool and small and light. I just put my sim card from my regular cingular phone into this one and it worked. First of all I was worried about the sound quality, because that's pretty much why I needed a new cell phone, and it was great. I tried the speaker phone too, and it'll work when you need both hands, but slightly distorted...nothing you can't deal with.

Camera is about what you would expect in a phone, it'll work if you really want to capture a moment, but won't do much good otherwise. When you view the pic on the phone it looks terrible because it shows it at a lower resolution, but when I e-mailed it to my self on my computer it looked like all the other cell phone pictures.

Oh and did I mention it has a frikin flashlight? And it's almost as bright as those little key chain lights too. It doubles as a flash for the camera, but when I used it it flashed very very softly and didn't light up my photo much...but I didn't pursue it any further.

Only thing that annoys me so far is that I can't add any words to the dictionary of predictive text, so if I want to use any swear words or acronyms or shortened versions of words in my text messeges I have to switch to ABC mode and then switch back. meh

Pros It's small and cutesy

Cons Alarms, AIM text input defaults to T9

Summary I have yet to find a compact cell phone that's not the size of a Palm Treo whose features act like they should. In fact, even the Treo has its shortcomings, such as the Contacts interface and lack of voice dialing. The Moto SLVR L7's backlight turns off before the display does, so when you press a key to turn on the backlight, you lose your place, iTunes limitations, etc. The RAZR doesn't have a note pad or daily repeating alarms- which even this little Pantech has. Speaking of which, the phone is generally decent and seems built well. Call quality is good, speakerphone is okay, camera is lame, etc. I have my cell phone w/me 24/7. I like to use it for a daily repeating alarm Mon-Fri mornings. All I ask for is a daily repeating alarm with snooz. The Pantec has it, but you can't turn of the alarm while it's snoozing. There's just no way to do it unless you either delete the alarm or manually enter the setup menu and set snooz to "off" (both of which negate the purpose of repeating alarms with snooz). You simply must wait until the next snooz cycle and catch the alarm while it's going off, then open the phone to turn the snooz off. There are no applications on the C300 that even allow T9 text input except (where?) - you guessed it, the place you type text the most; the instant messaging program. Everytime you begin to enter a text message, the application reverts back to T9 rather tha normal text mode. Normal mode is selectable, but you have to manually select it EVERY time you begin a text entry. Therefore, this app requires 3 wasted key presses every time you want to enter a new message, whether you're in a conversation or beginning a new one: one to view the recipient, one to enter text entry mode, and one to remove the T9. EVERY TIME! Lastly, the IM application has to completely reload itself each time you use it. Meaning, if you close it w/o logging out to view another app, it will take several seconds to reload the IM app each time you open it; even though you may be still logged in, it has to reload the app for 5-10 seconds. BOGUS!

These kinds of oversights annoy me. When you move into your phones and live with them 24/7 like I do, these little annoyances add up to bigger ones. With phones as expensive as they are (commonly $300 and $400-this Pantech was only $120, but still), I feel like the manufacturers should be rolling out the red carpet for me. As it stands, I feel more like I spend too much time trouble-shooting phone bugs for these companies simply because they don't test them enough in the real world.

If all you want to do is make a few calls, then you might like this. But for any real mileage, look elsewhere. This is pretty much just a semi-expensive toy.

Anyway, that's my take on the Pantech C300 and a bit more.