And the Pantech saga continues… this Korean manufacturer filed for court receivership a while back, which is basically equivalent of bankruptcy in Korea. Pantech is Korea’s third biggest smartphone manufacturer and is following Samsung and LG, though truth be told, those two companies are way ahead. Pantech was a subject to a couple auctions but not all of them failed considering not one company sent a bid, despite the fact many of them were interested, at least according to reports. Lenovo, Xiaomi, Huawei, ZTE and even Samsung were rumored to be interested in purchasing Pantech, but neither of these companies decided to purchase this Korean smartphone OEM.
Pantech actually released an extremely affordable phablet, Pantech Vega Popup Note, about a week ago and it seems that was a great move by the company. The official retailer price for phablet is just 352,000 Korean won, which translates to $317. Reports are surfacing that retailer sold out the initial 300,000 units of this phablet in half a day and the carriers have allegedly ordered an additional 600,000 units of this device. Vega Popup Note features a 5.6-inch 1080p (1920 x 1080) display along with 2GB of RAM for all your multitasking needs and 16GB of internal storage, which is expandable via MicroSD card. This handset is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor clocked at 2.3GHz which ships with an Adreno 330 GPU for graphics processing. On the back of this handset, you’ll find a 13-megapixel main shooter, while there’s a 2.1-megapixel snapper on the front side of the device. This handset also comes with a stylus which pops-up from the device itself at the press of a button. 4G LTE is also on board and rounds up an impressive offering by Pantech.
As you can see, this phablet is a rather powerful piece of technology and considering the price point, no wonder it was sold out that fast. In the meantime, Pantech is still trying to find a buyer and company’s debt is only getting bigger. Pantech now owes $475 million and the future really isn’t all that bright for the company, but at least the Vega Popup Note is selling like crazy, though I doubt the company is making any significant cash with the sales of that phablet. The company in charge of selling Pantech, Samjong KPMG, said that there were several companies who showed interest, but neither of them actually listed a bid for this smartphone OEM.