By Stephen Schenck | February 7, 2012 11:46 PM
Pantech isn’t known as a huge player in the smartphone world, at least not in the West. The company’s first Android destined for the US was released earlier this year, the Pantech Crossover, a QWERTY slider on AT&T. Rather than continue to crank out low-end models in the States like the Crossover with its 600MHz processor (we know it can do better; we’ve seen much more powerful Pantechs arrive in Asia), it now looks like Pantech might be ready to step up its game, with the publication of FCC documentation revealing a Pantech destined for Verizon LTE, apparently called the Apollo.
Apollo may just be a code name, but it’s what the company is using for the phone’s FCC ID. Just what kind of phone is it, though? Engadget did some snooping the Bluetooth SIG database, looking for Apollo’s model number, and found the device listed under the category for Android smartphones. That would have been a safe guess (and the ADR in the model number ADR8995 might have served as another clue), but it’s good to have confirmation nonetheless.
The FCC paperwork shows the Apollo outfitted for CDMA and EVDO operation, in addition to LTE on Verizon’s 782MHz band 13. We still just have a handful of LTE-equipped smartphones to choose from on Verizon, so it will be a bit of a coup for Pantech to have a model among them. Hardware-wise, it’s hard to say where Apollo will fall, but a processor in the 1.0-1.2GHz range would seem appropriate.
