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But first things first--the Duo is still a phone, so we start off with voice features. It's equipped with quad-band GSM support with world-roaming capabilities, a speakerphone, voice commands and dialing, and a vibrate mode. The phone book is limited by the available memory (the SIM card holds an additional 250 contacts), and you can store up to 12 numbers per entry as well as e-mail and home addresses, an IM screen name, important dates, and more. You can also pair up an entry with a caller group, as well as a photo or one of 10 polyphonic ringtones for caller ID.
Getting down to business, the Duo comes with plenty of productivity applications for the working professional. They include the full Microsoft Mobile Office Suite for creating and editing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, as well as an Adobe Reader client for viewing PDFs. Other PIMs include a clock, a ZIP manager, a voice recorder, and a calculator. You can also handle multiple applications via the Task Manager. E-mail and messaging are key features that mobile workers will love. It ships with Microsoft's Direct Push technology for real-time e-mail delivery, as well as synchronization with all your contacts, calendar events, and tasks via the Exchange server. Of course, the Duo supports regular POP3 and IMAP e-mail as well. Instant messaging is supported. The Duo also comes with Bluetooth 2.0 (which supports stereo Bluetooth as well as dial-up networking). Though not quite a business application, we also found its support for TeleNav Maps and Navigator tremendously helpful. Do note that the Duo does not have built-in GPS though, so if you really want to make use of the TeleNav applications, you might want to get an external Bluetooth GPS receiver. You can read our full review of TeleNav for more details.
Definitely one of the most noteworthy features on the Duo is its ability to handle 3G/HSDPA speeds. AT&T has therefore provided the Duo access to AT&T's broadband content courtesy of AT&T Mobile Music and AT&T's Cellular Video services. Via these services, you have access to clips from content partners like Comedy Central, MTV, and ESPN, as well as streaming music, thanks to XM Radio. The Mobile Music store grants you permission to purchase songs from third-party music subscription services like Napster to Go, Yahoo Music, and eMusic (All songs can be purchased over-the-air, with the exception of Yahoo Music, for an additional fee). Downloads took mere seconds, and we're happy to report that streaming video and audio was rather zippy as well, with little rebuffering. If you prefer, you can upload your own music to enjoy, as the Duo supports a variety of music formats like MP3, WMA, and AAC.
Of course, what's a smartphone these days without a megapixel camera? Though the Duo only has a 1.3-megapixel camera, we were very impressed with the photo quality. Images were saturated with color, and outlines were crisp without a lot of blurring. Camera settings include four resolutions (1280x1024, 640x480, 320x240, and 176x144), three quality options, four white balance modes, four color effects, a self-timer, brightness, 4x zoom, and a multishot mode. There's also a built-in camcorder for short little movies. Settings for the camcorder are pretty similar to the still camera, except the camcorder can only record in two modes: 176x144 and 320x240 (Both in MPEG4 format). Video quality was not as good, with blurry movement and pixelated imagery, but was serviceable for a phone's camera.
Performance
We tested the quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900; GPRS/EDGE; UMTS/HSDPA) Pantech Duo in San Francisco using AT&T's service. Call quality was great; callers reported hearing us loud and clear with little noise and static in the background. Similarly, we heard them quite clearly as well. Speakerphone quality was not as good, as we were often instructed to speak up, and there was a slight echo whenever we spoke. We also paired the Duo with a Cardo S-2 stereo Bluetooth headset without any problems.
As far as download speeds go, the Duo knocks it out of the park. Downloads took mere seconds, and we're happy to report that streaming video and audio was rather zippy as well, with little rebuffering in between video clips. The phone's performance was good too, and we had no problems managing contacts and transferring over documents like PDFs. However, certain applications sometimes felt a bit sluggish. We experienced slight delays when launching the camera application, and doubly so when we tried to use the TeleNav navigator, as the phone kept trying to get a GPS signal.
Video looks quite good on the Pantech Duo, though the streaming video from AT&T's Cellular Video sometimes appeared slightly pixelated and blurry. Music quality was decent, but we wouldn't rely on the phone's dinky speaker system to listen to your favorite songs--we suggest opting for a stereo Bluetooth headset instead.
The Pantech Duo's rated battery life is up to 3 hours of talk time and up to 10 days of standby time. We managed to get a tested talk time of 4 hours, 55 minutes.
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