Last week Pantech launched the Vega Racer 2, and its CEO said that “even though Samsung and Apple are powerful players, the product quality of the Vega Racer 2 is second-to-none”. That’s a very bold claim coming from a manufacturer much smaller than both Samsung and Apple, but also a great way to grab attention. The question is: will that turn out to be true?
The Vega Racer 2 smartphone will arrive with a dual core 1.5 Ghz S4 processor, which is there with the best of them, but this will also cause a problem because Qualcomm is scrambling to make this chip as fast as possible because of so much demand already, and the Galaxy S3 isn’t even out in US yet, but that one will use the S4 chip, too, so it will make the chip even less available than it already is. This is why Pantech had to reduce their sales predictions accordingly, even though Qualcomm owns a stake in the company.
Other specs for the Vega Racer 2 include a 4.8″ Super IPS LCD with a 1280×800 resolution, 1 GB of RAM, 16 GB of storage, microSD card, Bluetooth 4.0, 8MP camera with 1080p video recording, and a 2 MP front-camera. It also features a 2020 mAh battery, which is slightly smaller than Galaxy S3 (2100) but a bit bigger than HTC One X (1800).
It will of course run Android 4, and I love the fact that it uses software buttons, which I think look really good on a phone compared to physical buttons. I still think buttons are a pretty crude way to deal with things today, and I would’ve preferred something like Meego or BB10’s gestures for multi-tasking and so on, but I doubt we’ll see something like that anytime soon, and at least until Android 6 or 7. Google is barely getting into standardizing the ICS design now, so they won’t switch to a completely new UI paradigm very soon.