Alcatel OT-708 Review

Atcatels OT-708 is currently the cheapest touch screen phone on the market. It is pretty well rated and for the price tag of around £30 the features are impressive so I decided to take an in-depth look.

The OT-708 is quite small and looks good. It is primarily available in green colour unlocked but I found many providers have re-branded models of this phone selling in their favourite corporate name and colour, for example Vodafone has it in red.

The phone features a touch screen, microSD card slot, Bluetooth v2.0, 1.3MP camera (1280x1024 pixels) with video recording, USB 1.1 connectivity, 5MB internal storage, JAVA MIDP2.0, SMS/MMS, WAP Browser, Calender, Weather, Calculator, Organizer and 8hour talk-time.

Out of the box the phone comes with a charger, battery and headphones. There is no memory card and no USB lead for PC connectivity. These must be purchased separately. The phone is itself quite small 82 grams, measuring 96mm x 53mm it is 14.5 mm thick but due to the curvy design and sloping edges the thickness is neither felt nor seen. The phone easily slips into a trouser pocket.

The front panel of the phone is entirely touch sensitive, including the black area under the screen. There are no buttons in the front. The power button is on the left and the volume buttons on the right. The phone has a USB port at the bottom as well as a mini stylus slot. The USB port is versatile and serves as a charger port, USB data port for PC connectivity and headphone port.

The OT-708 uses a resistive touch screen, which means it does not offer feather-touch experience like the capacitive touch screen on the iPhone however the software on the phone is fast and intuitive making it easy to use.

The phone offers a home screen with a pane of icons on the left (calls, weather, music, calendar, pictures) and pane on the bottom (phonebook, dialpad, SMS) and a clock. Either pane can be shown or hidden. The icons on the left pane can also be dragged onto the desktop to convert them into widgets. For example dragging the calls icon onto the desktop converts it into a handy widget which lists number of missed calls and unread text messages. Once converted to a widget the icon slot on the left pane remains empty. The panes cannot be further customized. The phone display is fixed in the vertical orientation and tilting the phone will not reorient the display. The bottom of the screen shows blue lights which act as buttons that show/hide a pane and also as a finger-swipe area. The right hand light opens the options menu.

The options menu has three sections dealing with utilities, communication and entertainment. Each section has related icons, for example the entertainment section features the music player, radio, camera etc. This clear grouping of icons makes it easy to find what you are looking for instead of having to scroll through long lists.

Making a call and answering is relatively easy. You can popup the number pad on the home screen or browse your contacts using the bottom pane icons. When the phone rings it clearly displays answer or drop options. The touch screen also cleverly unlocks when the phone rings. Call quality and signal strength were good. Writing a SMS is simple enough. A word of warning though, this phone does not offer a QWERTY keyboard to type messages, instead it offer as standard number pad interface. The T9 on the phone is pretty clever though and you can see suggestions for the word as you type and can usually simply select the correct word half way through typing.

I was surprised with the number of USB connectivity options. When the phone is connected to a PC it pops up a menu allowing you to choose a mode to connect the phone in. There is the usual data card mode which lets you read/write files to the memory card, there is also the com port mode which lets the phone work with Alcatels PC Suite. The mode I found exiting is Webcam which lets you use the phone as a PC webcam. Windows vista quickly found drivers and installed it allowing me to use the phone camera with skype. There is also a PC modem mode which lets you use the phone as a internet modem. As an aside Alcatels PC Suite is pretty good and lets you backup restore your phone book and also lets you compose text messages and update contacts using a PC. The phone can connect with it over USB or Bluetooth.

What I found the phone was lacking was the ability to use the microSD card for saving phonebook entries and text messages. The microSD is used only for multimedia (pictures and music) so installing a card does not increase the default phonebook capacity of 800 numbers. The maximum card capacity is also limited to 4GB. The interface features extremely thin scrollbars when scrolling through contacts and long menus. It is very difficult to scroll down without hitting the bottom entry accidentally. This issue is somewhat alleviated by the search option which searches contacts as you type. MP3 playback did not work as advertised for me and the phone kept saying 'invalid format'. Finally the home screen layout resets itself if the phone is restarted and widgets have to be dragged back in place after a restart.

What I found most appealing was the clear interface, large text and beautiful colours making the phone very accessible to young and old alike. The PC webcam feature was also impressive.

Overall the OT-708 may not compete with the £200+ touchscreen handsets on the market in terms of customizability, applications and features but it does offer a unique and stylish handset with plenty of features for a low price. It is extremely hard to find a handset with such a diverse feature set at this price. So the OT-708 is definitely value for money and deserves the stars it is getting in its reviews.