Master of cheap and cheerful mobiles Alcatel has decided to get serious, offering a phone with a BlackBerry-style Qwerty keyboard for less than 50 quid.
For the princely sum of £44.95, Phones4U is offering the Alcatel OT-802 on pay as you go. As well as the Qwert stuff it has an optical trackpad, 2-megapixel camera, Web browser, FM radio and up to 9 hours of talk time.
This device doesn't have features many take for granted, such as 3G or Wi-Fi, but it should do a fair job of making calls and writing text messages. Web browsing at snailish speeds will be a frustrating experience, however.
Email and social networking could be more usable, but we'll tell you more once we have one in for a full review.
It comes after the release last week of a very funky-looking pink and black Qwerty slider phone -- seemingly modelled on one of the Microsoft Kin devices -- for the startlingly low price of £30.
Alcatel is staying well away from the smart phone big boys by providing acceptably stylish phones at rock-bottom prices, and fair play to it. Their functionality which isn't that far away, for instance, from one of the low-end Nokia smart phones like the 5250 which we took a look at today.
As the company says itself, it "caters for budget-conscious consumers who are looking for credible phones that do not break the bank yet still fulfil basic mobile needs, including mobile messaging, MMS, image capturing, social networking and more."
Good luck to it, we say. Any of you Alcatel fans out there?
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Anonymous 25 August, 2010 06:02
Hi found your content to be very interesting appreciate the good work you doing…
anonymous 25 August, 2010 11:01
Thanks :)
Anonymous 26 October, 2010 15:29
I've had the ot802 about 4months and it is the most reliable phone I've used to date, We all get caught up in the end of contract frenzy of what can i get for as little as possible when dealing with contracts, I'm no different I paid £35 p/m 18m for the nokia n86, it lasted for 8months. I simply expect more because i pay more for it, I wanted a phone that didn't make it obvious I had gone down it status when I had to replace my nokia, nor did I want to pay a ridicoulous amount of money to buy a phone i would only keep as long as my contract lasted. THe wave covers the basic which we all use talk/text and more recently social networks, to be fair everything else we use maybe the 1st 2/3 months music, web, email downloading all these widgets, apps, there are so many of these extra's available but in all honesty they aren't used as a regular so why pay so much more per month on a contract to get a phone that does them for free or pay so much for phone on pay as you go ??
My wife has now started looking at going p.a.u.g so I've palmed off my wave and bought the alcatel 890 I've got android for less than £100. Which is very grown up of me because on contract i use approx 100mins 200 texts a month and there are better deals on paug
anonymous 1 October, 2011 18:08
AVOID this phone misdirect s text messages. If you send a multiple sms out - and get an sms come in while its still sending - it will misdirect your OUTGOING text to the number of the incoming text. Then Alcatel will deny that its happening. it suffers from sms misdirect
anonymous 3 September, 2012 17:48
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