Pantech Renue (AT&T)

AT&T's latest messaging phone, the squat $69.99 Pantech Renue, may not look like much, but it's one of the better messaging phones the carrier is offering right now. It has a rugged, eco-conscious build, responsive touch screen, roomy slide-out keyboard, and a user-friendly interface. On the other hand, it has a weak camera, lacks voice dialing, and isn't a great video player. Still, it should make you happy if your main interest is messaging.

Design and Call Quality
The Renue measures a squarish 3.9 by 2.5 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs a reasonable 4.5 ounces. The slide-off back panel is made from a textured, slightly rubberized black plastic, while the rest of the phone is covered in a mixture of shiny and matte black plastics. The front of the phone is mostly dedicated to the 3.2-inch, 320-by-240-pixel display. Though it looks bright enough, that resolution is pretty low for a display this size, so text and images look jagged.

When closed, there are three touch-based function keys beneath the display. The screen slides open to reveal the Renue's spacious, four-row QWERTY keyboard. The keys are well-sized, and made of shiny black plastic with white and blue lettering. They're a little flat, but otherwise easy to press. Text messages are threaded, so they read like a conversation. That, combined with an attractive interface and the solid keyboard, makes the Renue a great phone if you like to text a lot.

The Renue is made from 67% recyclable and hazard-free materials with packaging made from post-consumer recycled paper and soluble ink. The phone is AT&T eco-rated, UL Environment certified, RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) compliant, and comes with an Energy Star 2.0 charger and power saving app, along with eco-themed calendar reminders and alarms. All of those features add up to earn the Renue our GreenTech award. And even with its eco-focus, the phone is built well enough to withstand extreme temperatures, humidity, and solar radiation, so it's a bit more rugged than your average device.

The Pantech Renue is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and dual-band HSPA 3.6 (850/1900 MHz) device with no Wi-Fi. Voice quality is average. Voices sound fine in the phone's earpiece, but maximum volume is just a little bit low. Calls made with the phone have poor noise cancellation but sound decent otherwise. And calls sounded okay through a Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset , but there is no voice dialing, Bluetooth or otherwise. The speakerphone sounds fine but is not nearly loud enough to use outside. Battery life was average at 6 hours and 27 minutes of talk time.

User Interface and Apps
The Renue has a sharp, simple, touch-based user interface. There are five customizable home screens you can swipe between, to which it's easy to add apps or shortcuts. Icons at the bottom of the screen give you quick access to the phone dialer, contacts, messages, and applications. The app menu features three pages of large, colorfully animated app icons. And while it's certainly no speed demon, the Renue's Qualcomm QSC6270T processor is able to move things along at a decent clip.

The Renue has an email app with access to AIM, AOL, AT&T, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo accounts. The Opera Mini 5.1 browser works well to deliver WAP and HTML pages. AT&T Navigator is preinstalled for voice-enabled GPS directions, but that costs $9.99 per month. If you want to use the Web browser, a data plan costs $15 per month (or $10 per month when you also have unlimited messaging). For those prices, you're better off with even a low-end smartphone, so I'd only consider the Renue (or another feature phone on AT&T in general) if you're looking strictly to talk and text.

Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
For multimedia files, there's 190MB of free internal memory, along with an empty microSD card slot underneath the phone's battery. My 32 and 64GB SanDisk cards worked fine. The phone is able to play AAC, MP3, and WMA music files. Sound quality was good through both wired earbuds and Altec Lansing BackBeat?Bluetooth headphones . The music player is attractive, and displays album art spinning around like a record when it's available. Video support, on the other hand, isn't as strong. The Renue is only able to play H.264 and MPEG4 videos at resolutions up to 320-by-240.

The Renue's 3-megapixel camera lacks an LED flash and auto-focus. Shutter speeds are good at 0.5 second, though it takes another second to save the photo. Pictures taken look average for a 3MP sensor, though they come out fairly dark, even outdoors. And the video camera is pretty much unusable. It records 320-by-240-pixel videos at a choppy eight frames per second indoors, and 11 frames per second outside.

So the Renue isn't a multimedia powerhouse, but then again, no feature phone is. If you're most interested in talking and texting, however, it's a very good choice. The Samsung Evergreen has comparable features to the Renue and is also worth a look if you're interested in a phone purely for messaging. The Pantech Swift? is also similar, but at $119.99 it's more expensive, and it isn't as fast as the Renue. If you want more, there are some excellent smartphones available like the $49.99?HTC Vivid? and the $99.99?HTC One X , though you'll have to pay for a monthly data fee.

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