AT&T Pantech Element 8-Inch 4G LTE Tablet Review

USB Performance and Final Thoughts

When we were transferring the 2GB movie file over for battery life testing we noticed a difference in performance as it took longer to transfer the movie to the Pantech Element than other tablets we have tested. For example, it took 3 minutes 57 seconds to transfer the 1.98 GB MP4 movie file to the Pantech Element, but just 2 minutes 37 seconds on the Motorola Xoom. After some quick math we found the Pantech Element had 23.6 MB/s read speed and 8.6 MB/s write speed when moving files between the tablet and our desktop PC. Our desktop PC uses an ASUS P9X79 Deluxe motherboard and the testing was done on the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 port, so there was no bottleneck on the desktop PC!

Final Thoughts and Conclusions:

After spending a month with the Pantech Element we found it to be a great tablet. We have been using 10.1-inch tablets for the past year, so moving over to the smaller 8-inch screen took a bit to get used to, but once we did we loved it! An 8-inch waterproof LTE-enabled tablet with solid battery life makes for a compelling tablet.

The operation of the tablet was just like any other Android Honeycomb tablet, so anyone that has used Android 3.2 before should be able to pick it up and use it without hesitation. Since the Android operating system is fairly standard we focused more on the features, battery life, camera quality, processor performance and USB performance in our review today. All of the features and areas that we tested looked solid! This is the first tablet that we have tested with the Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8060 dual-core 1.5GHz processor and it easily out performed the NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor in the tablets that we compared it against. Not only did it perform better in the benchmarks, but it also felt faster during regular use. Some people might be put off by the Pantech brand name, but don’t be!

The AT&T Pantech Element is priced at $299 with a two-year contract. That is more than the Kindle Fire or Barnes & Noble Nook, but less than Motorola’s Xyboard 8.2 and other carrier tablets. The 7-8″ tablet market is getting crowded, but that is only a good thing for consumers as it means you have more options and competitive prices. Our testing of the AT&T 4G LTE network outside of St. Louis, Missouri showed the network to be solid, but the performance numbers were a little lower than we wanted to see.

Legit Bottom Line: The Pantech Element is a waterproof 8-inch Android 3.2 tablet that runs on the AT&T 4G LTE network and can handle life’s small mishaps!