The Black Campbell

The Samsung flipphone I had was dying — crappy battery and was doing strange things like not receiving my voicemail and texts.  Since I was about due to reup my Verizon account, I decided to try something outside of the flipphone (especially as Verizon and other carriers are trying to force peple away from simply voice & basic text devices.)  The only one that really caught my eye after a bit of reading was the Pantech Jest — mostly because I want a free phone if I’m locked into a contract.

The Pantech is nicely sized and fits into a pocket well.  It’s got a handsome colorful screen that looks nice, but washes out something fierce in the sunlight.  It doesn’t help that the screen gets scratched up pretty quickly — or did just sitting in my mesh motorcycle jacket pocket for a few days.  There’s a slide out QWERTY keyboard that works decently for texting (the main purpose of the phone, I suspect), but it can make dialing a number a bit of a hassle, and is a real pain in the butt when you have to deal with phone menus at your bank or what have you.  Build quality is solid: my cat spilled milk all over the phone and knocked it off the counter, but a quick bit of paper towels and snapping the battery back in, the phone did well.  (I did have to pull the battery a few days later to get the phone to accurately read the battery gauge.)

Voice quality is so-so; turned up to the maximum microphone and earpiece setting, people do have trouble hearing me if there’s a lot of ambient noise and vice-versa.  Just using it for the occasional phone call and text, I get about a 4-5 day charge on the Jest; I traveled through Scotland with the phone charged and off, so that I would have comms on returning to the States, and after that time, it still have a 2 or 4 bar charge.  (It had been on for two days, so it kept trying to find a network in the UK — more on that later.)  Heavy phone and text use will drop your time, and internet services will most likely kill a charge in less than a day.

The phone does have the ability to web surf, be used as a navigation tool, but I don’t tend to use those features.  You can play music on the Jest, and there’s a dedicated note button for the feature.  I’ve only tried it, but with headphones the sound quality isn’t bad.  It’s not replacing my Sansa clip-on MP3 player soon.

The phone buttons are locked when the device is closed, you have to slide the keyboard out to unlock and use the device.  This also turns the phone on from sleep mode and can be done by accident while removing it from a pocket, or shifting it around in a backpack (hence why my phone was on in the UK when it ought not to have been.)  The control mechanism is a circular pressure or optical sensitive OK button.  It works well sometimes, and other times make you want to dash the phone off of the nearest hard object.  Even changing the sensitivity settings, I’ve had a devil of a time getting it to function well.

As a free phone, it’s a great little device.  Had I had to pay more than $50 for it, I’d have been a bit upset.  It looks nice, functions adequately as a phone and better as a text device, has decent battery life, and a very good 2mpx camera (no flash.)  It’s a gateway phone, designed to give enough functionality to the teen social networking crowd to lure them up into a smartphone.