Pantech is the third biggest Korean smartphone manufacturer, following Samsung and LG. Truth be told, Samsung and LG are far ahead, but still, Pantech is the third OEM in Korea. This company hasn’t been doing that well though, they’ve been looking for a buyer for quite some time now. Back in August, Pantech asked for help from Korea’s largest carriers to commit to large-scale purchases in order to prevent bankruptcy, that was the rumors at the very least. Pantech went on sale back in September and then again last Friday, the company didn’t receive any bids though. Many reports came our way saying that Lenovo, Xiaomi, Huawei, ZTE and even Samsung might be interested, but nothing happened and Pantech is now in even bigger problems. You would assume that a company in Pantech’s position doesn’t plan to launch a smartphone anytime soon, well, you’d be wrong. Pantech just announced a new handset and priced it extremely low.
This handset was supposed to launch a while ago, Q2-Q3, but the launch was delayed due to Pantech financial struggles. Pantech Vega Popup Note is now available for purchase in Korea via SK Telecom and its price is only 352,000 won ($315). This handset features a 5.6-inch 1080p (1920 x 1080) display along with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage (expandable via MicroSD card). The 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 this 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 for fast connectivity speeds.
As you can see this is a rather powerful device and the price is extremely affordable, though I don’t believe Pantech will sell many of these devices considering the state the company is in. This might actually be the last Pantech device that will see the light of day, unfortunately. I hope I’m wrong and this company manages to find a way out somehow, but I really doubt that.