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Quadrant Vellamo GLB 2.1 Egypt (720p) GLB 2.1 Egypt (1080p) AnTuTu HTC One S 5,141 2,420 57fps 29fps 7,107 LG Prada 2,114 825 28fps 14fps 5,335 Panasonic P-04D 1,833 703.75 20fps 11fps 5,326

Gaming performance was OK, but not great. My game of choice was Shadowgun, a very graphically intensive third-person shooter. While it was certainly playable, I noticed quite a few dropped frames when the action got hairy, and would hesitate to recommend the phone to someone for whom gaming is a priority. It's worth pointing out that the Quadrant test made it appear the phone was only using one core — the company didn't respond to our questions about that.

Update: We've heard from Panasonic that the P-04D takes advantage of both cores, but that the processor responds dynamically to load. Aurora Softworks, the makers of Quadrant, let us know that a fix for the issue should be included in the next update.

One of the phone's bigger issues was mapping performance. Even with Wi-Fi, 3G, and GPS enabled, the test unit frequently located me tens to hundreds of yards away from my actual position. It once insisted that I was in Kyoto (where I had recently visited with the phone) when I was actually in Tokyo (about 300 miles away), requiring me to kill the app to set things straight.

Battery performance on the P-04D was very good — I always got more than a full day of light to moderate use with the screen set to auto brightness. A typical day for me included listening to MP3s, an hour or two of web browsing, a few calls, light Twitter and e-mail, and half an hour each of video playback and Shadowgun. It's worth noting that the latter can be a real battery hog; in the P-04D's case running down 10 percent of the battery in less than twenty minutes.

Reception was great — I never lost a call on the P-04D and had great signal all over Tokyo and Kyoto. I can sometimes have serious problems getting a connection indoors on my SoftBank phone and the difference was noticeable. Data speeds were a different matter — the average 1.8Mbps down I got was considerably slower than the 3Mbps I get on my iPhone 4 on SoftBank, but upload speeds were right around 400kbps on both devices. Audio quality was good — the P-04D's single speaker isn't ideal for listening to music, but it's loud enough to function as a decent speakerphone, or to hear clearly in a loud environment like a busy city street.

It's worth noting here that the European Eluga variant includes built-in NFC for things like contactless wireless payments, which the Japanese P-04D does not, so I can't comment on that feature of the device. Also, while the P-04D on Docomo does include support for IC-based contactless payments with FeliCa, I wasn't able to try the feature out on my demo unit.