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Fall 2009 Preview

Nov 20, 2009, 10:45 AM by Eric M. Zeman

Phone Scoop was able to spend a few moments with a bunch of new handsets from Pantech, Casio and Kyocera. Read our first impressions of the Impact, Rock, Incognito and others here.

Pantech was (finally) showing off the Impact, which was announced in October but not actually seen. For some reason Pantech and AT&T didn't want to share images of this device until today. That said, it's a really attractive phone, so we don't know why they were hiding it.

Impact

The Impact is a sideways clamshell that has a capacitive touch keypad on the front of the phone. When the keypad is not illuminated, the surface is mirrored and reflective. It is a sharp looking phone, especially with the chrome rim that rings the outside of the front panel. Dialing on the capacitive touch pad felt OK, and the Impact provides haptic feedback as you dial.

The clamshell opens to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard within, as well as a D-pad and other soft keys/controls.

I thought this keyboard was excellent. The keys are nicely sculpted, have excellent travel and feedback, and the overall spacing of the keyboard was comfortable. The D-pad was just a bit on the small side, but it worked well.

I didn't care for the way the soft keys and send/end keys were placed above the keyboard. They're a little awkward to figure out, and I often found myself hitting the wrong button. They all had good travel and feedback, though.

The Impact is running the same feature phone user interface that is found on most AT&T phones. It was snappy and worked well, offering quick access to applications such as the camera, browser, and so on.

In sum, the Impact is a very well built and solid phone that should be appealing to the messaging crowd.

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Next page: Casio

About the author, Eric M. Zeman:

Eric has been covering the mobile telecommunications industry for 17 years at various print and online publications. He studied at Rutgers Newark and University of Kentucky, and has a degree in writing. He likes playing guitar, attending concerts, listening to music, and driving sports cars.

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