The new phones arrived today — a Pantech Crux for each of us.  Here are my first impressions:

– Activation out of the box was simple — I had instructions for how to do it, but when I installed the battery and turned the phone on, it was pre-programmed to do it by itself when I told it to.

– The ATT service has never been at greater than Edge here in Central Texas (2.5G, if you will).  The Verizon service is 3G, just like their coverage map says (to be fair, ATT’s coverage map correctly identifies us as Edge).

– Neither of us has made a phone call yet, but I listened to the activation message when it called in, and it sounded fine.

– It has the same capacitive touch screen as the iPad, so it feels solid (if only hubby could learn a softer touch with it — he keeps stabbing at it, but I imagine that will come in time).

– The display is clear and crisp.  It has several settings which allow a large font display (the clock was one).

– In addition to the software number keypad, if you turn the phone on it’s side, it switches to a QWERTY keyboard.  I’m sure this is for texting, but it’s handy when you’re trying to enter contacts as well, even if it does mean you’re flipping the phone back as forth for whichever key display is more appropriate.

– I can input a ton of information for each contact — multiple phones, two addresses, email addresses, birthdays, etc. (I suspect this is pretty standard).

– I had to manually enter my contacts from the Motorola, but that wasn’t a big deal.  I don’t have that many, and, for the most part, I only call hubby on it anyway.

– I thought I’d read somewhere that the icons were not configurable, but I was able to replace icons I didn’t want (mostly) with icons that won’t incur a monetary charge if I hit them by accident (we didn’t get a text or data plan). (My Verizon, Media Center, and Message cannot be removed).  I moved several tools to the front page.  Too bad it didn’t have a stopwatch icon available.  That might have been nice to have easily accessible.

– It has a three megapixel camera without a flash, and it’s pretty lame.  I’m not sure if this will improve with experience — it didn’t get good reviews.

-This phone has a solid feel to it.  It has terrible reviews, but so far, I like it.

Instead of getting a second battery for the phone, I saw one of these:  A Motorola Universal Portable Charger.  There are several reasons this intrigued me, but the two primary reasons are that it can be charged separately from the phone AND it can be used on any device with a micro USB charging port — the MiFi comes to mind.  It’s very thin and light and claims to add five hours of battery time. It doesn’t come with a charger, but if you have a device it will work with, the charger for that device is all you need.  To charge both of them while the Pantech’s were charging, I used the charger for the Motorola phone and the charger for the MiFi.

This is just first impressions, but if you’re in the market for a robust feature phone that doesn’t require a data package, this may be worth a look.  You can make a it into a music player, and it has VCast.    It has dedicated music player buttons on top.  It also has a dedicated voice command button, that I keep hitting by accident.  Maybe I should look into voice commands.  With a two year activation, it’s dirt cheap, too.