Pantech Marauder Pro Reviews

Pantech really did a good job with the Marauder. Perhaps its only real weakness is the camera. The hardware is some of the best I've seen from Pantech, which squeezed a lot of functionality into a slim and pocketable smartphone. It's also one of the best-performing phones I've seen from Pantech in a long time. It's an excellent voice phone, showed strong network performance, and aside from the slightly-less-than-awesome battery life, is a great communicator. That's what makes the camera and video camera such a bummer. It's not so bad as to nix the Marauder from your list, but if photography is your primary use for a smartphone, you might want to consider something else. In sum, it's not every day that you come across a sideways slider that gets this many features right.

Putting aside its bulky size and flat keypad, the Pantech Marauder is an excellent QWERTY phone. In addition to running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, it has a no-brainer UI for beginners, and operates on Verizon's 4G LTE speeds. More importantly, it won't break the bank. As previously mentioned, it's currently being offered for free, but even without the promotions and discounts, it'll still just be $100 under a two-year contract.

If you don't want to pony up the money for a Motorola Droid 4, the Pantech Marauder is a decent bet for an inexpensive messaging smartphone.

When we recently reviewed Verizon’s BlackBerry Curve 9310, we mentioned that for the same price of $49 on-contract, there are better options. The Pantech Marauder is one of them. Not only does it have the advantage of running Android ICS, but also can use Verizon’s 4G LTE data network. Overall, the Pantech Marauder fits in the $49 price category just fine, but keep in mind that some of its features, such as the display and camera, can’t compete with devices costing $200+. Our only real let-down with the Marauder is with its QWERTY keyboard. It had the potential of being really good, but with its flat keys that have very little spacing between them, anything more than a short email or message will be a challenge to type without pressing a wrong key. For the same price, the Samsung Stratosphere has a better designed keyboard and a 4” Super AMOLED display, so keep that in mind.