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Pantech Swift: The purple messenger
1:18
AT&T is trotting out a new QWERTY messaging phone, the Pantech Swift, going on sale today.
With its lavender accents, there’s little question of Pantech’s young audience, and the compact phone is appropriately priced at $69.99 with two-year contract and after a $50 mail-in rebate.
The QWERTY keyboard, by the way, supplements the otherwise too-small 2.8-inch QVGA touch screen. Pantech has also added some curvature — a slightly curved screen that also angles up when you slide it open. Button-pushers will also get a single hardware select button beneath the phone’s face.
The Swift comes with a 2-megapixel camera with video capture, a Web browser, and an onboard e-mail client. There are also social networking clients onboard like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, plus AT&T’s usual roundup of family-tracking and navigation apps. Yellow Pages Mobile and several game demos come preloaded as well.
The Swift accepts up to 32GB in expandable memory, but has a slower processor (600MHz) and a smaller battery (1,000mAh) than we’d like.
Fellow CNET mobile editor Lynn La and I got our hands on the phone ahead of launch — catch out full Pantech Swift review here.
Article updated at 12:00am with more details and a link to the full review.