Pantech, the Korean smartphone maker that has filed for bankruptcy in August, has released a new product – a phablet called Vega Pop-up Note, with quite a few notable features, Cnet reports. Still, the best feature of the new handset is its price – with specifications competing with the top flagships on the market, costs less than half of their average price.
The Pantech Vega Pop-up Note is a 5.6″ display phablet with a pop-up stylus that doubles as a digital TV antenna – this is probably the feature that inspired its name. The phablet’s specifications are quite convincing: it has a quad-core Snapdragon 800 CPU running at 2.3 GHz, 2Gb of RAM at 800 MHz, a Qualcomm Adereno 330 GPU at 450 MHz, 16 gigabytes of internal storage that can be expanded using a Micro SD card, a 5.6″ IPS LCD screen with an 1080p resolution and everything else a modern smartphone or tablet needs, including Bluetooth 4.0, WiFi a, b, g and n (tetherable), USB 3.0, GPS and others. The camera built into the phablet is also notable – it has a 13 megapixel sensor, an aperture of f/2.0 and a LED flash, featuring autofocus, optical image stabilization and HDR. It can record 1080p video at 30 fps. The secondary (front) camera of the device is also quite fine – it has a full HD resolution both for still images and video. It has quite a large battery as well – its 3,200 mAh battery offers users a decent talk and standby time despite the strong hardware and large screen.
The price is maybe the most attractive feature of the Pantech Vega Pop-up Note. Although its hardware configuration is similar to a series of flagship handsets released by top smartphone manufacturers, its price is sensitively lower – it is sold for 352.000 Korean Won (approximately $318), while the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 sells for 957.000 won (over $860) on the local market. Pricing their smartphones this way has been an effective strategy for Pantech, allowing them to sell 30,000 units of their latest handset in the first morning of its release.