Alcatel One Touch change

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There's no way around it, the Alcatel One Touch Evolve is cheap — both in price and specs. At $99 all-in, it's a bargain smartphone that has a sleek design, but it's held back by an old version of Android, a dim screen, and a lousy fixed-focus camera.

The Evolve, along with the $139 One Touch Fierce, is part of the Alcatel's efforts to bring entry-level budget smartphones to top-tier carriers in the US, something the company hasn't done before. Though the Evolve is a budget device, and I'd expect lower-end specs and features for its price, its poor performance means I still can't recommend it. For a little more money and a lot more performance, look at the LG Optimus F3 or the Nokia Lumia 520/521, three budget phones that are worth the money.

Design
Despite its budget price, the all-black Evolve doesn't look particularly cheap. Compared with the shiny design on the Fierce, this model looks understated with its soft-touch matte back cover and silver accents. There's also a shiny dark detail around the edge, near the screen, which helps elevate the design.

Unfortunately that high-end veneer disappears once you pick it up, because I could feel the back cover move around when I even gently grasped the sides of the device. Though the back cover feels soft in my hands, the phone itself feels boxy.

The Evolve has a soft-touch matte black design on the back.

(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)

Measuring just 4.7 inches tall, 2.5 wide, and 0.4 inch wide, the Evolve is small enough to use one-handed without straining to tap any part of the screen. My everyday phone is a much larger phablet, so it feels tiny in my hands, which is a welcome change. It's also heavy for its size at 4.7 ounces, though that didn't bother me.

Up top you'll find the standard power/lock button and a headphone jack, along the right side there's a volume rocker. Unlike most Android phones that have the charging ports at the bottom, the port is on the left side here. That makes the phone awkward to hold in your left hand while its charging.

The headphone jack and power button.

(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)

On the back, there's a removable battery that covers the SIM and SD card slots. It's a pain to have to remove the battery just to swap in a SD card, which can add up to 32GB of extra storage to supplement the 4GB that's built-in.

Instead of physical buttons, the phone has capacitive hot keys, housed on the bezel below the screen, for the home, back, and menu controls. The only way to tell which button is which is to tap somewhere on that bottom bezel to turn on the backlight, which illuminates the outlines of each hot key.

With only 233 pixels per inch, it's no surprise that the 4-inch 480x800-pixel screen doesn't look sharp, though I was disappointed by how dim it looks even at maximum brightness. Icons, especially the ones designed by Alcatel, look fuzzy, but medium- to large-size text is easy to read. This display supports 16 million colors, and the colors of the icons and wallpapers on the screen look saturated.

The 4-inch screen looks dim and is hard to read in sunlight.

(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)

Because the screen itself is highly reflective, it's tough to read in full sunlight. It also collects a lot of smudges, which makes hard to read the screen clearly. You'll want to keep a cleaning cloth handy so you can wipe it down often.

Operating system and features
The Evolve comes with Android Jelly Bean 4.1, which isn't the most recent version of the operating system. However, unless you're very well acquainted with the OS already, you probably won't spot too many differences between 4.1 and the most current version, Android Jelly Bean 4.3.

You will, however, notice Alcatel's custom Android overlay, which has colorful menus and square-shaped icons. Swipe down from the top of screen to reveal the custom notification menu, which has a row of settings where you can toggle Wi-Fi, sound, Bluetooth and more.

Alcatel's modifications remind me of Samsung's TouchWiz overlay, which is too juvenile for my tastes, but the simplistic design here will appeal to anyone who needs a little extra guidance.

Alcatel's custom notifications menu (left) and the stock messaging app.

(Credit: Screenshot by Sarah Mitroff/CNET)

All of the standard Google Android apps, such as Gmail, YouTube, and Google+ are preinstalled, and Alcatel opted to use Google Chrome as the default browser instead of the stock Android browser. That's a plus for me, as Google's Chrome is my top-pick mobile browser because you can sync your open tabs to your computer or tablet.

From Alcatel, there is a notes app, a movie studio that lets you edit video, and a special setup wizard that walks you through setting up your phone's language and basic settings, such as WiFi or e-mail. T-Mobile also added its suite of four apps, including Visual Voice-mail and T-Mobile TV. In order to use T-Mobile TV, Visual Voicemail, and Mobile Hotspot, you'll need to pay an extra subscription fee, thought the TV and voice mail apps both have free trials.

The gesture-based keyboard Swype is preinstalled and set as the default keyboard. If you're not familiar, Swype lets you move your finger from letter to letter to input text, instead of tapping on the screen. The keyboard was more exciting several years ago, but now gesture typing is more widespread and is available on the stock Android browser and other apps like Swiftkey.

Camera and video
The Evolve has a 5-megapixel back camera. My major knock against it is that it has a fixed-focus lens, which limits what kinds of photos you can capture.

The 5-megapixel camera has a fixed focus lens that can't take sharp up-close pictures.

(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)

It's because of that fixed focus lens that you can't take sharp up-close photos with this camera. If you tap on the screen while the camera is on, which on most smartphone cameras focuses the lens on that area, it will simply adjust the lighting. There is also no flash, so you'll have to tweak the camera's ISO and exposure levels to compensate for poor lighting conditions.

Indoor shots with a lot of natural light had significant digital noise and there was a glowing halo-like effect over anything that was white. In the standard studio shot, the photo again has noise and looks dark in places. CNET's image gallery shows how other phones handle the studio shot test.

Outdoor shots were a mixed bag; some photos looked natural, while others looked washed out.

In this close-up shot, the camera's fixed focus lens couldn't focus on the mug in the foreground.

(Credit: Sarah Mitroff/CNET)

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Alcatel One Touch fierce

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Despite its name, the Alcatel One Touch Fierce is anything but "ferocious."

For starters, its 5-megapixel camera takes poor photos, and its quad-core processor lags behind rival phones.

And yes, while the Fierce's competitive $139.99 prepaid price and solid call quality are redeeming factors, it's best just to save up some more dough for a faster, smoother, and more reliable prepaid smartphone like the LG Optimus F3 or Samsung Galaxy Victory 4G LTE.

Design
The Fierce comes in two colors, slate and silver, with the latter featuring a nice brushed-metal look that adds a unique accent. But apart from the stylish battery door, the device feels cheap: hollow, plastic, and toylike. At 4.6 ounces, it's also very light.

The handset measures 5.13 inches tall, 2.64 inches wide, and 0.35 inch thick. Up top are a 3.5mm headphone jack and a sleep/power button. On the right edge lives a volume rocker and at the very bottom is a Micro-USB port for charging.

The back houses a 5-megapixel camera with an LED flash that sits right below the lens. At the bottom is a small grille for the speaker. Using a small indentation on the bottom left corner, you can pry off the battery door.

Despite a removable battery door, you can't take out the battery itself.

(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)

Underneath, you'll see a microSD card slot (it accepts cards of capacities up to 32GB), and a warning label. The label notifies users that the 1,800mAh battery inside is nonremovable. This is odd given the fact that you can take off the phone's back; one would expect the battery to be removable. The label also reads that the phone doesn't support "hot swapping" of the microSD and SIM cards. This means you can't switch these cards out while the Fierce is turned on. Instead, you must power off the device beforehand.

The 4.5-inch qHD display has a 960x540-pixel resolution. Unfortunately, the screen isn't sharp. App icons had blurred edges, pictures looked speckled, and even default wallpaper looked grainy and showed notable color banding. In comparison, the LG Optimus F6 has the same resolution, but its display is far crisper. It's also more sensitive, unlike this handset's display, which wasn't very responsive or accurate. Often times, I felt I had to tap slightly harder to select the items I wanted, and typing was difficult since the screen would incorrectly register the wrong letters.

Moreover, the display has a narrow viewing angle, and unless held perfectly straight at eye level, some parts of the screen would look momentarily blacked out. Viewing it in direct sunlight also worsened this effect.

Above the display is a VGA camera, and below are three hotkeys (for back, home, and recent apps) that light up white in use. Long press the home key to launch Google Now, and long press the recent apps key to bring up extra setting options.

Software features
For the most part, the phone's user interface stays true to a skinless version of Android -- the dialer, lock screen, and app drawer have been left pretty much untouched. However, the Fierce also features some colorful icons that can be considered "playful" at best, though honestly, they look dated and childish.

It runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean and as expected, it comes with your standard package of Google apps: Chrome, Search, Plus, Maps with Navigation and Local, Messenger, apps for the Play store's Books, Magazines, Movies and TV, and Music portals, Talk, and YouTube.

T-Mobile landed a handful of apps as well. You'll get T-Mobile My Account, which gives you information about your phone and data plan; a trial subscription to the caller ID service Name ID; and apps that help set up your visual voice mail and mobile hot spot. Lastly, the media streaming service T-Mobile TV offers a 30-day trial to channels like Fox News and ESPN.

In general, the Fierce sports a skinless Android UI (left), but its cartoonish icons leave something to be desired.

(Credit: Lynn La/CNET)

Basic task managing apps include a calculator, a calendar, a native e-mail client, a notepad, a sound recorder, a clock with alarm functions, a voice dialer, voice search, and a to-do list. At the same time, you'll get some less common (but still useful) apps such as a flashlight, an FM radio, a movie editor, Facebook, Twitter, an app to help you set up wireless devices via a Bluetooth connection, and Lookout Security, which backs up data and scans apps and files for malware.

Additional features include about 4GB of internal storage (though this ends up being more like 2.4GB that's available to the user), 1GB of RAM, and Bluetooth 4.0.

Camera and video
The camera operates quite slowly, save for its shot-to-shot speed refreshing rather swiftly. It takes nearly 3 seconds (an average of 2.94, if you want to be exact) to launch, and you'll need to wait a beat for it to call up certain menu items and activate settings. It even takes a few moments longer than I'm used to, to switch from landscape to portrait mode.

Another issue is the camera's confusing UI. When launched, a row of nine icons appear on one side of the viewfinder. Some of these icons represent something obvious (like HDR and panoramic shooting modes). Other icons have a small explanation pop up when you tap on them. For example, tap the smiley face icon and the sentence, "Auto capture when smile is detected" appears.

And yet other icons are vague and have no explanation. There's an icon that looks like a speedometer. When I tap on it, nothing happens, and I have no idea what it does. Same goes for the small box icon that has a plus and minus on it (though I'm used to that representing some sort of brightness or exposure meter, this one doesn't appear to be so). And same goes for the star -- yup, it's just a star. I tap on it, thinking it might be a way to save favorite shots, but there's no explanation. True, one can do some light sleuthing to figure out what these icons mean, but for general users, these meanings should be intuitive. If they're not, then Alcatel should provide consistent tool tips to guide its consumers, and it's odd that some icons get a little explanation of what they do, while others don't.

The icons on the left are about as clear as Egyptian hieroglyphics.

(Credit: Lynn La/CNET)

As for photo quality, the device's 5-megapixel camera was mediocre. Colors looked muted and ran on the cold side, objects looked blurry (especially around the edges), and even with amply lit settings, you can see a notable amount of digital noise. In addition, because the camera has a fixed focus, getting sharp, crisp images of objects up close was nearly impossible.

Both the 5-megapixel camera and the front-facing camera has 4x digital zoom, a "face beauty" shooting mode that lets you adjust your smoothness, skin color, and sharpness in a photo, and geotagging. The cameras also have face detection and a timer.

However, the 5-megapixel camera has an LED flash, the aforementioned nine shooting modes (like I said, some are known, some are unknown), an exposure meter with a range of -3 to +3, seven color effects, 14 scene modes, eight white balances, and four antiflicker options. You can also adjust the sharpness, hue, saturation, brightness, and contrast of a picture, choose from seven photo sizes (from QVGA to 5 megapixels), and the camera has six ISO options. Meanwhile, the VGA camera's exposure meter only ranges from -1 to +1, and it only has five color effects, two scene modes, six white balances, three antiflicker options, and two photo sizes (QVGA and VGA).

Though the flowers look bright, this photo lacks focus and white hues are blown out.

(Credit: Lynn La/CNET)

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Alcatel one touch pop C1, C3, C5 and C7 outs cheap droids

Alcatel is Alpha all on the IFA, excursion of the idol-S and Idol mini together with hero and Idol and now it's is the low midrange series of smartphones pop C introduction.

The one touch pop C7 is the most interesting of the group with a 5 "screen and 1.3 GHz quad-core chip. The pop-C5 has a 4.5-incher, the C3 has a 4-incher of the WVGA resolution and 1.3 GHz dual-core processor, and finally, there is the C1, providing a 3.5 inch HVGA display and dual-core 1 GHz processor.

All devices are 4.2 sports with Android jelly bean.

In October of the pop, pop-C1 and C3 are C5 in November during the 5-incher C7 is expected at the end of the year.

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Alcatel one touch Hero Phablet and Idol alpha are officially

Alcatel today announced a second wave of its Android smartphones. After the announcement of the one touch Idol and Idol S mini has the cell phone manufacturers today the Idol and the one touch hero Phablet presented Alpha Android smartphones.

The Alcatel One Touch Hero is the first Android Smartphone 6 "display Pack. It features a 1080 p resolution and uses IPS technology. Under the hood there is a 1.5 GHz quad-core CPU with 2 GB RAM. Unfortunately still their do still passed not the company.

On the back of the hero, Alcatel has opted for a 13 MP shooter, capable, full-HD video recording and supported by a LED flash. A 2MP-Schnapper provides video chats on the front.

Under the back cover, there is a 3400mAh battery and a MicroSD card slot for expanding the integrated memory, the either 16 GB 32 GB is.

The Alcatel One Touch Hero is however much more than your regular hard swing Smartphone thanks to its accessories. Firstly, the company has developed a stand that doubled as a pico projector. It can output 12 lumen light output value and creates an image larger than 70 cm.

The Alcatel One Touch Hero and its accessories

Then there is the E-Ink cover, added display a fascinating extra E-ink layer on the hero. Just like the Pico-Projector Accessory combines the E-Ink cover on the hero over the pins on the back of the Phablet. Alcatel has announced, a second blanket called MagicFlip, the LED lights you notifications about new notified only adds.

Finally, the last hero-accessories feature is worth mentioning Bluetooth enabled phone. Yes, the hero is a feature phone as an accessory (like HTC mini). It can not only make and accept calls to get texts but also the hero synchronize phonebook and calendar entries.

Still, Alcatel One Touch Hero aims for rates and availability to announce.

For the Alcatel one touch Idol Alpha aimed at the mid-range Smartphone spectrum with its 4.7 "IPS-display resolution of 720 p." Thanks to the quad-core CPU with 1.2 GHz, the idol-Alpha offer probably also some respectable performance.

Alcatel is very proud of the idol-Alpha design, a metal body with pretty curvy, translucent edges mixes. It is relatively thin, as well as with a waist of only 7.5 mm. These translucent edges of light also when new notifications or the phone it load and playback of video material is (similar to Sonys Ambilight LED).

The company has not much more informed about the idol-Alpha specifications. Among the unknown, our ears to keep its price and date of availability, but we noted, if new information.

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Alcatel one touch go mini-Idol and Idol S official

Alcatel has its collection of smartphones with the launch of one touch Idol S and one touch Idol extends mini. Both units have a compact design and a sleek profile. The slimmer of the two with its dimensions of only 7.4 mm is the idol-S, while the idol-mini is also very slim at 7.9 mm profile.

The highlights of the Alcatel-Idol-s are a 4.7 inch IPS display with a resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels. The device is clocked by a dual-core processor with 1.2 GHz with 1 GB RAM and has about an 8 - megapixel - rear camera, that can record 1080 p video at 30 frames per second.

Th Alcatel one touch Idol S comes with a 1.3-megapixel front camera and runs on Android 4.2 jelly bean. The device has 4 GB of internal memory, and there's a microSD card slot for further expansion. Alcatel of the mid range new entry has multiple connectivity option and the Smartphone is in Slate, fresh rose and cherry red color options available.

On the other hand, the idol-mini is an entry level Smartphone, sporting a relatively small 4.3-inch display with a resolution of 480 x 854 pixels. The Smartphone also has a 1.3 GHz dual-core processor, 512 MB RAM, 5 megapixel rear camera and 4 GB internal memory with MicroSD card support.

The idol-mini runs Android 4.2 jelly bean and comes with HSPA +, Wi-Fi, A-GPS and Bluetooth 4.0-radios.

The Alcatel Idol mini will be available also with its hardware specifications, the remaining mostly unchanged in a dual-SIM version. The only difference is that dual-SIM-Idol-mini does not come with a MicroSD card slot and has 8 GB of internal memory.

Alcatel Idol mini are also in three different colour options - Cranberry Rosa, to win silver and slate. At the moment, there are no details about the prices and the availability of either new smartphone.

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