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This is a guest post by Merlyn Akhtar.  Merlyn Akhtar is a tech-savvy person who isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty with hardware.  One of the first upgrades she performed was installing a 2X CD-ROM drive in a PC in her early teens back when Prodigy was an awesome ISP.

What is it?

The Pantech Matrix Pro is a dual-slider smartphone running Windows Mobile 6.1 on the AT&T 3G/EDGE Network.

The Good

Being a dual-slider, there is a dedicated phone keypad on the vertical axis and a QWERTY keyboard on the horizontal axis.  Both sliders have quick, smooth mechanisms.  The phone keypad is a flat surface, but each number “button” feels distinctive when pressed.  The QWERTY keyboard has chiclet-style keys with decent play.  The keys lay a little too flat for me as a thumb-typer, but nail-typers or those with smaller fingers would probably be fine. 

There is convenient quick-key on the side for the 2 Megapixel camera.  Bonus: you don’t need to open either slider to use the camera,  which combined with the quick-key, is helpful in capturing those spontaneous moments.  The phone’s side real estate also includes an easily accessible micro-SD slot (no need to remove the battery), volume controls, and a record button.

The display is crisp and bright and didn’t get in the way of my overall user experience.  Call quality was good.

The Bad

While the size of the phone is not so bad on the vertical and horizontal, it feels a bit chunky and hefty in the hand.

Though the phone boasts music and video capabilities, there is no dedicated headphone jack.  You have to use the included adapter, an approximately 2-inch cable.  It is something you could just keep attached to the end of your headphones, that is, if your phone is the only device you use with them.  Otherwise, the adapter seems like an easy piece to forget or lose. 

The In-Between

The phone’s surface is a sleek, mirror-like finish that looks really cool, but like most glossy finishes, it attracts fingerprints.  Also, the smoothness of the finish made it difficult for me to get a good grip when typing text messages, but a more experienced texter may not have a problem.  Another typing issue - my left index finger activated the volume keys a few times during vigorous typing.

The navigational toggle pad is circular, but doesn’t scroll.  As someone who has grown accustomed to the iPod wheel and cellphones like the LG Chocolate, I expect a circular pad to scroll, otherwise the circular toggle pad doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.  Setting that aside, the toggle pad has a satisfying feedback for each directional.

Some other features that you might be interested in, but that I didn’t get to try out: Video Share Calling, which allows for streaming video calls and GPS turn-by-turn navigation service.  The OS is Windows Mobile 6.1 - you either love it or hate it.

The Crux

The Pantech offers much more than your basic cellphone.  It is quite stylish for the price and is well-suited for avid-texters.  If you’d like to pick up the phone from AT&T it will set you back $349.99 without a contract or $199.99 with a 2 year contract.  A current AT&T promotion with a $100 MIR brings the price to $99.99.

Oh, you could get it for free if you win our giveaway.  Check that out here!

Check out the gallery: Pantech Matrix Pro