Hands-on with Pantech's sleek new C610 for AT&T

Today Pantech and AT&T announced the immediate availability of the Pantech C610, a high-fashion folder phone. The C610 supports a wide variety of AT&T multimedia functions in addition to high speed HSDPA data on AT&T's 3G network. We were offered the chance to play with the C610 for a couple of days to get a feel for it before it officially hit the market.


To start off, we were quite surprised by the relative quality of the photos shot with the C610's 1.3 megapixel camera. The colors are good, focus is just fine for subjects that are a few feet, or further, away, and it has a nice user interface. Photos (and videos) that are created with the C610 can be stored in internal memory or on a microSD memory card (not included) and viewed on the phone's 2", 262k color display.

That microSD memory card slot also comes in handy when used in conjunction with the C610's music player. The phone can be used with a USB cable (not included) to synchronize with Windows Media Player or any other MTP(INFO) compatible PC based music program, but since we didn't have a cable we just used Windows Media Player to sync the music directly to the card via a USB card reader. Album art didn't show up, but the music was all properly organized and sounded fine. The phone supports both wired and A2DP Bluetooth stereo headphones and can play in the background while you use the phone for other tasks.

Another cool feature built into the C610 is support for AT&T's Navigator software, thanks to the C610's A-GPS(INFO) module. Satellite lock times on the phone are pretty quick, even if the Navigator software's UI seems a bit sluggish. Browser data is anything but sluggish, though; the phone easily managed 600kbps downloads using its built-in browser. In addition to basic text and MMS messaging, the C610 also features an IM client that is compatible with AIM, MSN, and Yahoo! messengers.

The Pantech C610 measures 93.2mm x 50.0mm x 18.3mm (3.67 x 1.81 x .72) and weighs 91g (3.3oz). It supports the 850 and 1900MHz GSM/EDGE and UMTS/HSDPA frequency bands. It is available from AT&T now.