The Alcatel OT-708 is a zero-frills touchscreen phone. With few of the flashy features that have made smart phones all the rage, it bears about as much relation to the iPhone 4 as a goldfish does to a great white shark. But it is very cheap.
You can pick it up for free on an £8.49 per month, 24-month contract, or for £80 SIM-free. For most people, though, it will probably make more sense to buy it on a £20 pay as you go deal.
Keep it in your trousers
Despite its tacky plastic carcass, the OT-708 isn't a bad-looking handset. Not much taller or wider than a Malted Milk biscuit, it'll slide into a pocket with no bother. It also feels like it will withstand far more torture than an iPhone or other high-faluting touchscreen handset.
The only physical controls are a power button on the left-hand side, and a volume-adjustment button on the other. Otherwise you control the handset via the 61mm (2.4-inch) resistive touchscreen, and the touch-sensitive area below the display. This area features blue LED lights that form various patterns depending on which part of the user interface you're in. That's about as flashy as this handset gets.
Tolerable touchscreen
The OT-708's resistive touchscreen is nowhere near as slick as the capacitive touchscreens on high-end smart phones. There's no multi-touch functionality for zooming in with a pinch of the fingers, for example, and you have to apply a degree of pressure to make the display register your input. But the touchscreen still gets the job done, and we found we made few erroneous prods, due to the interface's large icons and clear menu system.
The interface is basic by the standards of most touchscreen phones. The single home screen features two panels that can be hidden away when not in use. One, along the bottom of the screen, lets you quickly write a text, look up a contact, dial a number or access the menus. The other panel, which hangs down the left-hand side of the screen, provides access to some rudimentary widgets. Note you can't customise this panel to show different apps.
People who can't be bothered to look out of the window may find the weather widget useful, but the rest are pretty mundane. You can drag and drop them from the panel on to the home screen to see an expanded version, so the music player widget, for example, will show play and skip-track buttons.
Headphone dismay
As well as a music player and elementary features such as a clock, calendar and calculator, the OT-708 offers an FM radio. You'll have to use the poor-quality bundled headphones to listen to it, though, as there's no 3.5mm jack. Also, if you want to store more than a few tunes on the OT-708, you'll need to whack a microSD card, of up to 4GB, into the slot under the battery.
We'd recommend transferring your music on to your microSD card and then putting it in the phone, rather than using Alcatel's PC Suite software to transfer files directly to the handset. The software is repellent, and our handset didn't come with a mini-USB cable for connecting it to our computer anyway.
The 1.3-megapixel camera takes snaps fairly quickly and offers plenty of settings to play with, but it won't replace your dedicated camera, as its image quality isn't great. You can record videos, but they're choppier than the seas off Cape Horn, and pretty painful to watch as a result.
The OT-708 offers a Web browser, but it's not particularly easy on the eye, and without 3G or Wi-Fi connectivity it's horrifically slow. Overall, we'd rather punch ourselves in the face than try to access the Web on this handset.
Text fiend
It's possible to bash out a text message fairly quickly using the OT-708's on-screen alphanumeric keypad, as long as you've got the decent predictive text mode turned on. Entering each letter manually, however, is a gruelling experience, as the keypad isn't sufficiently responsive to recognise rapid-fire inputs.
The phone's call quality is fine, with voices coming through loud and clear on both ends. You can expect the battery to last a few days with normal use.
Conclusion
Without a complex operating system, speedy browser or humungous app reservoir, the Alcatel OT-708's touchscreen feels rather redundant. But that's not to say it's a bad device for the price, and we'd recommend it if you're a cash-strapped and undemanding touchscreen fetishist.
Before splashing out, though, give the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 a goosey gander, as it's not much more expensive and offers a larger touch-sensitive display.
Edited by Nick Hide
Android App 
RSS Feeds 
iPhone App 
Newsletters
User reviews18
Add your review
Style15 15 April 2012
Good: Cool blue LED lights, good battery life, cute design, high-quality voice recorder, records radio too
Bad: Bad camera, takes a long time to shot an image after pressing the shutter, takes a HELL OF A LOT of time to process/save the image after taking it, no seperate Answer/Ignore buttons, not enough software available to download, POOR video camera, difficult to write a text message
Comment: The camera is OK - the images are saved as a large size, although the quality is not that good enough. Even worse, it takes just TOO LONG to shot the image after pressing the shutter, as well as processing the image after taking it.
Another major problem is that when a call comes up, the answer and 'ignore' buttons are the LED lights. As a result, many times in my pocket, I accidently press one of those buttons when I'm taking my phone out! They should have added a seperate (non-touch) answer and ignore buttons. Thankfully, Alcatel done it for the OT-710 a year later, but I wish they done it before for this phone too!
This phone is OK, just depending on your point of view.
Ryan 30 October 2011
Good: I like the idea of the blue LED buttons that change depending on what menu or application you are using. It has a fairly sensitive and accurate touchscreen. It is very easy to use making it perfect for touchscreen beginners. It has a few handy widgets on the homescreen for easy access. The sound quality is fairly good and so are the headphones that come with it. It also has a good music and radio player as you can listen to music whilst browsing around menus on your phone. It is also quite small and compact, yet the screen is still large enough to read and use. The colours on the screen are good and the phone is generally quite good-looking. Finally, it comes at a very small price, but I wouldn't go as far as good value for you money..
Bad: The phone is very basic and it lacks a lot of modern phone features. Don't be fooled by it's good looks and small price as overall, the phone isn't that good at all. It's small buttons makes texting difficult and lacks in an acceloremeter which could have made things like texting a lot easier. The camera quality is very poor making photos and videos blocky and lacking in colour. I shouldn't worry about this too much as it has very ittle storage so you can't store many videos, photos and tunes on there anyway. There are very few applications out there that are really suitable for this phone, so overall, it cant really do much. The phone itself is quite responsive, but unfortuanately, browsing the web is painfully slow and with no WiFi, you have to pay for it.
Comment: Overall, this phone is pretty terrible and I recommend you forking out a bit more money for a phone that could do a lot more. Even texting is difficult on this phone! The phone claims to be able to a lot of things, but it can actually very little or do anything very well, making it very useless.
So in conclusion, don't waste your money like I did on this phone - it's not worth it!
Sandu Lazaroaie 12 July 2011
Good: Easy to use,the slide function on the blue leds at the bottom when you are at the main menu,camera takes pretty good photos,battery last more than other touchscreens,you have the ability to upgrade the firmware from home and that adds some improvements to sound and a little to video quality
Bad: A LOT of the features from other touchscreens are missing,video recorded is so bad quality,the headphones that come with the phone are missing the bass that most headphones have,text input in not responsive enough.
Comment: Overall the phone has the lowest price for this kind of phone and it is good for people who buy their first touchscreen cause it is easy to learn how to use it.
See all 18 user reviews