Pantech was early to the Verizon 4G LTE party with the Breakout , Verizon's first LTE phone to debut with a sub-$100 price tag. Pantech has upped the ante with the Marauder , a keyboarded Android smartphone you can get for free with a new contract. It has a large keyboard, decent specs, and runs Android 4.0. On the other hand, it's very bulky and its camera is only average at best. But if you don't want to pony up $200 for the Motorola Droid 4 , the Pantech Marauder is a decent bet for an inexpensive messaging smartphone.

Design and Call Quality
The Pantech Marauder measures 5.1 by 2.6 by .5 inches (HWD) and weighs a hefty 6.1 ounces. It's definitely bulky, but it's actually lighter than the 6.3-ounce Droid 4. Made out of textured black plastic, it feels solid, though the look is uninspired.

The 3.8-inch, 800-by-480-pixel capacitive touch screen looks bright and sharp enough, but seems a little small given the large amounts of bezel surrounding it; many other phones would be able to fit at least a 4-inch display into that amount of space. There are four haptic feedback-enabled touch keys beneath the display. Typing felt a little cramped on the phone's screen, but it slides open to reveal a generously sized five-row QWERTY keyboard.

The keys are backlit and well spaced, and I appreciate the top row of number keys. On the other hand, the keys are so flat that it's easy to press the wrong one. You'll probably grow used to it over time, but you won't be able to message at lightning speed right out of the box.

The Marauder is a dual-band EV-DO Rev A (850/1900 MHz) and 750 MHz 4G LTE device with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. 4G LTE speeds only averaged around 3.8Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up, which is slower than what we usually see. But I pulled out an HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE to compare, and it got similar results, so these lower numbers can probably be pinned on the network rather than the device. You can also use the Marauder as a mobile hotspot with the appropriate plan to provide a Wi-Fi connection to up to 10 devices.

Voice quality on the Marauder is good. Incoming calls sound loud and mostly clear, but a little thready at the highest volume. On the other end, calls made with the sound natural but a little fuzzy, and background noise reduction is average. The speakerphone sounds fine, but it's too low for outdoor use. Calls sounded great through a Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset  and standard Android voice dialing worked accurately. Talk time was solid, at 8 hours and 12 minutes.

Hardware, OS, and Apps

The Marauder is powered by a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 processor. Benchmark scores were quite good, though that also has to do with the phone's lower screen resolution. Still, you won't have trouble running any of the 500,000+ apps available in the Google Play store, and the Marauder is even a decent phone for gaming, if you don't mind the smaller screen.