Alcatel OT-708 One Touch Mini review

Alcatel has never has a strong reputation, mainly because its devies are low spec, super-cheap phones that are only available on one network. Before the demise of Woolworths, you could pick an Alcatel phone up for less than £10, although now the French manufacturer has stepped up its game.

The Alcatel OT-708 One Touch Mini is a full touchscreen handset. In fact there are no hardware keys in sight - even the buttons below the screen are touch sensitive, and highly responsive at that.

There's nothing fancy within the screen technology - it's resistive so the iPhone users of you will find you'll need to press a little harder when using it. There's also no swiping function or multitouch, but who needs such complicated features when the screen's only 2.4-inches?

The homescreen on the Alcatel OT-708 One Touch Mini looks pretty familiar - it's almost identical those on LG's S Class and Samsung's TouchWiz UIs, with widgets appearing on a panel on the left side and bottom panel.

To make these panels appear and disappear, simply tap the left or centre touch sensitive lights below the screen. To add widgets to the homescreen for speedy access, drag and drop them to where you'd like them to be. The selection of widgets available are pretty limited compared to other widget-based UIs, but the most used are there, including a calendar, music player and weather application. Probably the most handy of all is the missed calls/new text messages widget that collates any new actions in one place.

Enter the menu by pressing the right hand cluser of touchscreen buttons and you're taken to a three-part menu. These are colour coded, each to represent a different aspect of life. The far left coloured button is for utilties and includes links to the calendar, calculator and settings. The central menu helps you keep up to date with communication, so texts and the phonebook. This is the first you're taken to when hitting the menu button from the homescreen. The final menu is for multimedia and takes you to the camera, gallery and music player.

What did surprise us with the Alcatel OT-708 One Touch Mini was the applications setting, where you can download apps and access the eBook reader. Applications are currently pretty limited - when you click on the link to download applications, you're taken to a web page where the only option we found was Opera Mini. Below the applications icon is the link to the eBook reader. To view any books in the eBook reader, you'll have to download eBooks elsewhere, and the screen is a little too small to comfortably read a book, but it's a nice attempt by Alcatel to enter the applications game.

Multimedia-wise, Alcatel has scrimped slightly. Although never known for the most high-tech features, a 1.3-megapixel camera is disappointing. the quality of the snaps are grainy and suffer from poor effects in low lighting - not really surprising considering there's no flash or autofocus.

The music player is pretty basic too, and there's no 3.5mm headphone jack in sight. An FM radio is included, but the bundled stereo headset doubles as a receiver for this, and we wouldn't consider it to be the most comfortable set of earphones we've tested.

Other corners cut include the data capabilities. Although there is GPRS connectivity, a small boost from even Edge would be bonus. After all, how are we to make use of the browser (albeit basic) Alcatel has kindly provided us with when we only have GPRS to play with?

The Alcatel OT-708 One Touch Mini may not be the most advanced in its game, but it's pretty impressive for Alcatel's first endeavour into the touchscreen space. The UI is simple to use, especially when the widgets come into play and you get used to the touch sensitive buttons changing depending on which application you're using.