 This is David with The Verge and this is the Pantech Element. It's an AT&T tablet. You can buy it with or without a contract, but either way you're going to be paying AT&T for a data plan. Hardware wise, it's a pretty average honeycomb tablet. It's not the thinnest we've ever seen, but it's certainly not particularly thick. It's tapered nicely so that it's actually pretty easy to hold. It's really glossy on the back so it picks up fingerprints and scratches pretty easily, but that's pretty standard to a lot of phones we've seen. It actually feels just like a blown up smartphone. It has a SIM card slot and a microSD card slot along with microUSB and microHDMI. They're all covered by these sort of annoying flaps, but there's a reason for them. It's got volume and power controls right up at the top next to each other. You're definitely meant to hold this tablet in landscape mode. It's a 4-3 aspect ratio and it's an 8-inch display. It's a TFT display and generally it's fine. It's not as good as some of the ones we've seen. It's only 1024x768 resolution and some small text is hard to read and it has some jaggies on the display, but for the most part it gets the job done fine. One of the best things about the Element is actually the speaker. Most tablets have speakers that either go out the side or out the back, so audio is always being pushed away from you, but the Element is actually the speakers right on the front. So even though it's not the loudest speaker, it actually works really well because it's blasting the sound directly at your face as you look at it. There are two cameras on the Element. There's a 2-megapixel front-facing camera and a 5-megapixel camera on the back. The back camera takes decent pictures, but it's pretty much the same as every other tablet. The camera is also a little slow and it can take like a couple seconds to autofocus before it actually takes a shot. The front-facing camera is actually kind of terrible. It's a 2-megapixel camera, which is more than most that you see on tablets, but it's located off to the side here, so it's kind of hard to frame whatever you're trying to get in the photo since it's located in such an odd spot. You're definitely meant to use it in portrait mode, which works a little better, but this isn't really how you'd want to be shooting photos. The Element runs Android 3.2 Honeycomb and it performs pretty much like every other Honeycomb tablet we've seen. The operating system has some definite issues with bugginess and sluggishness and some things just occasionally not working at all as they should, but it's certainly no worse on the Element than any other device I've used. The browser, on the other hand, is actually worse than a lot of Honeycomb tablets we've seen. It's capable of rendering fonts and stuff, so sites will look a little different than you expect them to. It also does this thing where it'll load about 80% of the page without showing anything actually on the display, and then all at once will just load the entire page. So it looks like it's frozen before it loads every single page, which is just kind of strange. Generally, the Element is, as I said, just like most other Honeycomb tablets, but there are a couple of things that set it apart a little bit. It runs on AT&T's LTE network. There's also a piezo actuator inside the Element, which gives it a little bit of haptic feedback for virtually every action. Every time you swipe home screens or do much of anything, it gives you just a little bit of vibration to let you know that you did something. And it's designed to be kind of a more immersive experience, to make it feel like something is happening. And generally speaking, like in a game, it's a neat trick because it actually feels like you're hitting the pinball when you're hitting the pinball, but otherwise it's kind of jarring and actually makes it feel like there's a hard drive whirring inside the Element, which is not exactly what you want from your tablet. Overall it's pretty much just like every other Honeycomb tablet we've tested. It has some serious performance issues that we're hoping an ice cream sandwich upgrade will solve, but generally it's pretty much the same. Except for this. It's waterproof. It's rated IP57, which means it can sit in up to a meter of water for up to 30 minutes, but it becomes pretty unusable as soon as it's wet. You can't really do much, and often drops of water will actually press buttons so the screen just becomes kind of chaotic. So you can't exactly read in the bathtub, but you can certainly drop it in the bathtub and not really worry about it. At $299 with a contract, or $449 without one, there's really no reason to recommend the Pantech Element. AT&T's data plans get expensive quickly, and there's really nothing about the Element's hardware or software that makes it any better than any of its competitors, from the Kindle Fire all the way up to the iPad.