Performance and battery life
Thanks to Qualcomm Snapdragon S4, it’s no
surprise that Flex can run fast. The phone offers a dual-core 1.5GHz Krait
processor and you will immediately see Flex provide a similar performance and
speed to One X and Galaxy S III. Aside from the common camera app, popular
apps, like Chrome, Gmail, Maps and YouTube will all appear instantly and
switching between apps is as fast. In the browser, web pages are loaded fast
and actions like, panning, zooming and scrolling are smooth. We can tell the
same with animation and transition is Pantech’s startup, which is very amazing.
From cool booting, Flex brings you to lock screen then launcher within less
than 30 sec. The tests confirmed our real-time impression, showing that Flex
perform as fast as One X of AT&T. Its call quality is a plus, always clear
and noiseless.
Pantech
Flex
·
Quadrant: 5,132
·
Vellamo 2: 1,804
·
AnTuTu: 6,959
·
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms): 2,117
·
GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt Offscreen (fps): 13
·
CF-Bench: 9,412
·
Battery life: 8:34
Pantech
Flex
HTC
One X (AT&T)
·
Quadrant: 4,784
·
Vellamo 2: 1,638
·
AnTuTu: 6,956
·
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms): 1.453
·
GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt Offscreen (fps): 14
·
CF-Bench: 9,479
·
Battery life: 8:55
HTC
One X (AT&T)
Motorola
Atrix HD
·
Quadrant: 4,996
·
Vellamo 2: 1,610
·
AnTuTu: 6,241
·
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms): 1,325
·
GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt Offscreen (fps): 13
·
CF-Bench: 9,217
·
Battery life: 5:30
Motorola
Atrix HD
(Sunspider: the lower score, the better)
On AT&T’s network in Portland, Oregon,
Flex gets average speeds of 10.7Mbps (download) and 6.3Mbps (upload). That is
quite enough for most kinds of demand, but it is just as 1/3 of the highest
speed we measured with this network. Even with LTE activated, we got an average
runtime of from 36 to 42. Meanwhile, in the standard battery test, Flex could
last for 8h 34min before the battery was out.
Camera
As an upgrade from Burst, Flex has a rear
8MP camera, along with the front 2MB. However, even with a new setting,
Pantech’s implement continues disappointing us. The camera captures more
details than before, and under a group of narrow conditions, it provides very
nice images. Meaning, you will often find blooming highlights which can’t be
removed in EV settings, a problem continuing being true even in ideal lighting.
The camera’s performance is low in the dark where highlight is overexposed,
while the dark is low exposed and the colors seems a bit diluted. Touching
white balance sometimes appears useful though the colors weren’t much accurate.
Meanwhile, 1080p video is smooth but camcorder is as weak as image. In a
ridiculous exchange, Flex works well at night in HDR mode, but that small
reward couldn’t save a forgettable camera.
Despite the fast Snapdragon S4, camera app
is slowly loaded and you will see a considerable delay during shooting. Even in
burst mode, speed is not fast – around 1 photo per second – and the image is
still at 8MP in this mode, detail and file size are about half of them. To be
worse, it’s impossible to focus in burst mode, even from the start.
Camera
Camera software is weak too and those who
want to change settings will only find EV and WB presets. Unfortunately, there’s
a bigger problem: camera app is very unstable. Whenever you shot a picture, you
may incidentally lock the phone and force it to restart. To be worse, if the
phone doesn’t respond, any shot you took would be ruined. This issue gets worse
when you try importing photo to the computer as any corrupted file is not
accepted, especially when you consider Flex as a smartphone for tech lovers.
Right, Flex’s camera should be judged in
term of smartphone’s cheapness but it is so unpredictable and unimpressive that
you may give up shooting, which is regretful. Based on fault software, even the
camera won’t turn up at the time when you need to capture the number plate from
the car of whom is stupidly pursuing you. Assume that Pantech is able to
improve the situation with a software update, but in fact it offers Flex this
unstable status and AT&T agreed to sell it – affecting the company’s
reputation.
