Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2010/07/29/review_phone_alcatel_ot_808/

Alcatel OT-808 fashion phone

Qwerty clamshell with text appeal

By Caleb Cox

Posted in Personal Tech, 29th July 2010 07:02 GMT

Review With its mirrored exterior and clamshell action, it’s quite deliberate that, looking at the Alcatel OT-808, you end up thinking it resembles a make-up compact. Evidently, it’s designed to appeal to budget conscious femmes or those who want something fun to use when out on the town, leaving the pricey smartphone at home. And if the mirror finish and make-up mimicry weren’t enough, above all else, it comes in pink too.

Alcatel OT-808

Alcatel's OT-808: made for gossip, the maker's say

Thankfully, I didn’t have the pink version, even so its somewhat uncommon square form factor certainly attracts attention. With a small OLED external display on the casing – that among other things indicates signal and battery level, messages and call status on the lid – the Alcatel OT-808’s tidy external design may well keep your interest long enough to go a step further and open it up.

At which point, all previous positives fly out the window. No longer are you looking at a shiny makeup compact, instead you’re faced something resembling a Fisher Price toy laptop. That said, the OT-808’s greatest quality is actually the Qwerty keypad, comprised of fairly large keys for a phone, no doubt for those with long nails. However, punctuation is problematic, with full stops and commas not given dedicated buttons, painting a vivid image of the demographic the device is aimed at.

With no buttons on the flip screen, the display prompts in the bottom corners are handled with dedicated keys below them along with large call start/end keys on either side with a navpad in the centre. Below is the Qwerty keypad which is quite sizeable, making the most of this square clamshell. It’s responsive and is easy to use – clearly labelled with a blue backlight for darker environments. However, the lack of dedicated punctuation buttons substantially hindered my text speed. I spose if u wrte lk dis and only use punctuation for winking faces, this wouldn't be an issue.

Alcatel OT-808

Punctuationally challenged

The OS is proprietary and fairly intuitive, with huge, easily identifiable menu icons. Spread over a scrollable page, the functions are vast and rather disorganised. Using submenus in places would have been an improvement. My biggest qualm came when sending texts. You have to wait for the message to complete sending before doing anything else. When I tried going onto other functions after pressing send, it would cancel and occasionally freeze the phone, which was certainly frustrating.

The focus on social networking is apparent, with dedicated Facebook and Twitter widgets, along with an instant messenger tool, Palringo, which connects to any existing messenger service you already use. The simple and user-friendly widgets show their worth, with faster access to the pages and the ability to leave them open in the background. Therefore, less time for loading and more time for stalking, ahem, I mean, browsing.

Alcatel OT-808

Handbag friendly

The device comes with Opera Mini 4 installed and a heap of useful bookmarks. Yet it lacks 3G connectivity so browsing can be tediously slow. Relying on the micro USB headphone input, the hands-free was a horrible experience. The headphones supplied are tinny, uncomfortable and certainly not an encouragement to use the FM radio widget.

There is stereo Bluetooth, so you have an alternative and this worked well enough with an Novero headset and you can choose to allow closed clamshell operation too. Like the supplied headphones though, playback through the music player was equally dreadful with a limited frequency response, reminiscent of listening to the music your bank pipes down the phone when putting you on hold. It does, however, play MP3, WMA and AAC music files.

The media player also handles H.263, H.264 and MPEG-4 video, which was crisp on its vibrant and reasonably sized 2.4in 320 x 240 display. You can store your movies on an external Micro SD slotting in behind the battery, as there’s only 80MB of internal storage which is only adequate size for photos and footage taken with the device.

The camera captures 2Mp images and 3gp video, with results exactly as you would expect, looking good on the phone display but not so good once on the desktop. These features are great if you want to attach their exports to an MMS, or remember something from a messy evening. Alcatel even provides a suite of software to hook up to a Windows PC and sync it up, along with an OS updater utility, which was a bit of a surprise.

Alcatel OT-808

Being put off by the media side of things added positively to the battery life, which I found relatively high. With a rated talk time of 9 hours, or music playback of 35 hours, I generally found myself charging the device every second day, but could still manage most of a third, running the extra distance with an empty battery signal and occasional alerts.

Alcatel OT-808

Eye-catching with a long battery life and the usual must-have social networking apps

Verdict

While the Alcatel OT-808 does have its flaws and takes a bit of getting used to, punctuation in particular, for £50 it is fairly versatile. The Alcatel OT-808 is a fun enough and cheap enough phone for your teenage offspring but I’ve had several women say how much they like it too, so it certainly has its appeal. ®

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