vB Easy Archive - C150 review

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C150 review
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Posted by: pdp76

This phone was attractive to me the moment it came out. It seems like there are very few basic candybar phones with Bluetooth out on the market right now. Plus the overall look of this phone is quite sexy. My wife needed a replacement and this phone seemed to fit the bill. During my research before getting this phone, I found very few reviews on it and I desperately wanted some insight to this phone since it's a relatively unknown brand in the states. But I bit the bullet and got it (for AT&T) anyway, so I thought I'd draw up a quick review.

Size, looks, and ergonomics
As I alluded before, this is a very slick looking phone. A bit "cutsey" IMO since it's all white (though there is a black one out, but doesn't seem available on AT&T as of now) so I'd imagine more women would be using this phone. But it's a great size, not too small, feels very solid in the hand, and buttons are raised so you can feel each individual one. The action of the buttons feel very good too, not too stiff and provides good tactile response. The little joystick works very well too, for the most part..... if you're hands are a little sweaty or oily though, the joystick becomes a little bit hard to use as your fingers will slip off it or accidentally press it down instead of move it left/right/up/down. Overall, it's not terrible, but can take some getting used to. Also, since the phone is so smooth, the battery cover is very hard to remove if your hands are sweaty or oily.

User Interface
Very simple, and a little bit similar to Nokia S40. Both my wife and I are long time Nokia users so this was nice. The main menu layout is almost exactly like Nokia. The biggest difference is the 'C' key on this phone. It's basically a dedicated key to go back to the previous menu or clear characters while typing. I actually like this better than the Nokia back/clear soft key. But like every difference, it will take a little bit of getting used to if you have used Nokia a lot. There is also a shortcut soft key (called Options) at the standby screen (right softkey) which brings up the equivalent of a Nokia GoTo menu, which you can edit and such. One other nice thing about the Pantech menu system is that if a menu item (such as backlight timer) has only a few simple options (e.g. 5sec, 10sec, 20sec, etc...) you don't have to select the item and bring up a new screen to change the value, the options pop up at the bottom of the screen and you can just use the left/right keys to select a new option. This is kind of neat, not a big improvement, but it is a good idea IMO. For the menu items that contain more extensive options, then you have to select the menu item and it will bring up a whole new screen with all the options. One big gripe I had is to bring up the main menu from the standby screen, you press the left soft key, not the middle joystick select button. That's not so bad, because you can get used to that. The real problem is that if you press the middle select button at the standby screen, it brings up the web browser!!!! It's very easy to accidentally bring up the web browser and start racking up data usage by accident. One last thing to say about the UI, the standby screen has all sorts of good info: date, time, bluetooth status, GPRS/EDGE (G or E) status, signal stength, battery life, vibrate or audible rings, and more.... very similar to Nokia.

Address Book
It's pretty standard, you can have up to 3 numbers per contact (if using internal phone memory) mobile, home, and work, and up to 800 contacts total. The problem I have is that you can't set a specific number to be the primary number, the mobile number defaults to primary. However, there is a caveat to this, if the contact doesn't have a mobile number, the default become the home. And if it doesn't have mobile or home, then default becomes work. Also, the biggest gripe I have in this area is that when you select which memory to use, Phone/SIM/Phone+SIM, that only dictates were new contacts are stored, it does not dictate which numbers are displayed in the address book. All contacts, whether on phone or sim, are always displayed in the address book regardless of this setting. Aside from that, you can also assign a picture and ringtone to each contact. You can also group contacts (like nokia) and assign a special ringtone to that particular group. Speed dial is also included, but not voice dialing.

Ringtones, audio, and media in general
The selection of ringtones it came with was pretty good. You can of course upload your own through bluetooth. They play quite loud and like most phones these days, supports MP3s. The keypad tones are customizable (from a preset list) and are very loud as well. Message and alert tones can also be customized, but only from a preset list, you cannot use your own uploaded tones for message and alert tones. Good thing their preset selection for message tones isn't horrible. Speaker phone is very loud as well, a bit tinny, but very usable. And last, but definitely not least, the earpiece volume is good too. I'm not hard of hearing or anything so I have zero issues with it. As for pictures, there is a "Photo Album" feature. I'm not sure exactly what this entails, maybe it's as simple as a special folder name. But it sounds like a great way to organize photos on the 12MB of internal memory. But I, nor my wife, takes many pictures with our phones anyway.

Texting and entering notes
I'm very used to T9 so this phone was a piece of cake for me to pick up. And just like other aspects of the UI, it is very similar to Nokia's T9 input. You press the # key to switch between entry methods. You press the * key to cycle through the T9 choices. And the 0 key means space, which isn't the case for all phone manufacturers. Very straightforward!

RF and call quality
This is always hard for me to judge because I live in a very populated area where there are cell towers EVERYWHERE. I almost always get half or more bars. So in this scenario, it works great. I know this probably isn't a very scientific study since I've only have a few calls, but none of them have dropped

Nothing special to report in this department.

Camera
One word... "eh...", what can you expect out of a tiny 640x480 VGA camera? It gets the job done and it's not completely useless. It's about on par with my wife's old Nokia 6102 camera. You've got 12MB of internal memory, so you can store quite a few pictures. This thing also has video capabilities, but of course don't expect too much from it either. But this is where bluetooth comes in, it's very easy to get the videos/pictures OFF of your camera. Lots of low end phone require you to get a separate data cable to offload media. Good job Pantech for including Bluetooth!

Bluetooth
Not much to report here, I successfully uploaded/downloaded media and connected a Cardo BT headset. No problems. Headset quality is just as good as on my Nokia 6126.

Extras
You got your Java, stopwatch, calendar, alarm, voice memos, and notepad. Pretty standard issue in most cases today. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if you can sync your calendar and notes via bluetooth to a computer, I don't really need to do that. But I'd imagine, bare minimum, you'd be able to send calendar entries and notes one by one to another bluetooth device.

Battery
Sorry, haven't finished using the 1st charge yet, I'll update this a few days later. But judging by the capacity, 950mAh, it should go past the cited 3hour talk time. The phone does a pretty good job at conserving screen power, it dims it after a few seconds and then just turns it off completely after another preset amount of time. And if the keypad is locked, pressing a key will only bring the screen to a dim mode, not full power.

Conclusion
This phone is a very solid entry level phone. There are a few gripes I have, some big, as mentioned above, but none of them were deal breakers. If you just want a basic phone, but with Bluetooth (which is more of a mid-level feature), you might really want to consider this phone. Plus, with the flood of clamshell phones nowadays, the candybar is actually kind of refreshing. Best of all, it's free after contract on AT&T. I would definitely recommend this phone as a entry level or backup phone.

Posted by: pdp76

After a couple weeks of use by my wife, we finally got a decent gauge of the battery life. Wow, it lasts quite a long time. This was actually suspected, due to the somewhat large battery capacity (950mAh) for such a small phone. We were a bit thrown off at first because it went from 4 bars to 1 bar quite quickly, within 2-3 days with light use (about 15-30 min a day). However, it lingered on the last bar for at least 1-2 more days with similar use. On most phones, if there is only 1 battery bar left it suggests immediate charging is required. However, when the c150 reaches 1 bar, there is still a decent amount of juice in the battery, even though the bar turns red. Only when the c150 shows 0 bars, do you have to charge immediately.

Also an update on call quality. While my previous praises on call quality were from the c150 end, I have since then gotten to be on the other end of the call. Unfortunately, call quality wasn't nearly as good. I would say it is average to a bit below average. This can be a subjective area to judge, but I found myself on several occasions asking, "What was that?" to my wife when she called me on the c150. But more objectively, I've tried calling voice activated services (such as TELL ME) where the voice recognition system had a very hard time understanding me when I called with the c150. My Nokia 6126 has no issues when using voice activated services.

And a couple for small gripes, I can't seem to upload JAR/JAD apps to the phone via Bluetooth. Nor can I delete the preinstalled demo JAR/JAD games. This is pretty annoying, and sneaky on AT&Ts part seeing how it would force you to buy games/apps from AT&T vs having the ability to upload your own games/apps.

Overall, this phone is still a good budget, no frills phone. Just don't call anyone who is hard of hearing with it!

Posted by: boflex03

thanks for the helpful review.