Alcatel OT-S520 review

Alcatel has a history of making affordable phones, but in recent times it's produced affordable phones that also look good. The OT-S520 is currently available to buy for only £15 and we wanted to know what you get for your money.

You can buy the Alcatel OT-S520 on pay as you go with a Virgin SIM at Woolworths.

Strengths
The first thing you'll notice about the OT-S520 is how small it is. At only 11mm thin it slips easily into a pocket and yet feels solid. We wouldn't go as far as saying that it was stunning but it is much more attractive than most budget phones.

The S520 is a compact candybar phone that fits easily into a pocket

A sleek black casing houses a small screen, compact keypad and VGA (0.3-megapixel) camera. On the side there's a handy mini-USB port that lets you charge it and use it as a Webcam but we couldn't get that feature to work.

The OT-S520 interface is well laid-out and easy to understand, so making phone calls or composing text messages is straightforward. You can also send and receive MMS, which is useful if you want to send pictures to your friends.

The S520's keypad is smaller than we'd like but it is usable

We rather enjoyed the OT-S520's games -- Chicken is a 2D platformer where you have to avoid getting squashed, and UFO sees you flying a plane and shooting at enemies. They're both very simple, but fun enough to keep you entertained at the bus stop.

Weaknesses
As you might imagine at such a low price, there aren't many features so be prepared for a fairly simple experience. There's no Bluetooth so you can't send files to friends -- and even if you could there's only 2MB of on-board memory.

The other downside of not having much memory is that you'll find yourself having to delete text messages in order to make space for new ones. On the subject of text messages, the keypad is much smaller than we'd like and some users may find this annoying.