Alcatel OT-E801 review

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Alcatel OT-E801 user reviews

October 13, 2007

Posted by: thniels

"Not that good, really"

What I like:

Pretty and it has MP3

What I don't like:

Poor menus, low sound quality and messy MP3 navigation

Review:

The phone looks nice and it has an MP3 player, but when that is said, there is not much else nice to say. I never figured out how to upload new wallpapers or ring tones. Wallpapers? Not a big issue, some would say. But in this case the wallpapers that are there, are of colors that work very poorly with the text colors available on the phone so it can be a real pain to read the text - particularly in sunlight.

The menus are "untidy" - as in "not orderly" laid out. It is difficult to navigate and not very obvious where what is. The buttons on the phone are adding to a pretty product but they are definitely not finger friendly. It is better than the Motorola aluminum foil Razr keyboards, but then I guess everything is.

If you don't answer an incoming call, you get a message the next time you activate the phone. Nothing unusual about that. The unusual thing is the place where these lists are stored on this phone - in a menu called Call Memory placed under Network Settings. I am sure that many of those functions I have not yet found (and not mentioned in the manual either) are there but scattered merrily around the menu hierarchy like this one turned out to be.

The reason I bought this phone in the first place was because I wanted a phone with an integrated MP3 player. It is there and it works... sort of. The songs cannot be managed in a folder structure and whenever the player is activated it points to the first song. So if you want a decent library of songs and needs to play from song number 117 - you are in for a gymnastic experience, tapping down through the songs... tap... tap. When you then find the song and play it, it is but a whisper from the plasticky ear pieces. The ear pieces fit poorly and don't sound very well. And, of course, the pin out of the USB connector is proprietary - just like every other phone on the market. So a better pair of ear phones means a soldering iron.

With a 2GB card you can have a song library to last for hours. At least if the battery could deliver. In standby - that is without talking, singing or texting, the phone has power for a couple of days. Not impressive. If you then start talking or even worse, listen to songs, battery time is almost a contradiction in terms.

I carried it with me on a plane the other day. In an optimistic hope that perhaps I could listen to Corey Barker while reading Kurt Vonnegut. First of all, I couldn't hear anything over the jet engines. At full volume I could still hear the flight attendant announcing that all phone be turned off but I couldn't hear Fish Ain't Bitin'. Of course, I wouldn't want to be the one that caused to plane to crash, so I wanted to turn the phone into flight mode... it doesn't have one. It appears that each and every other phone that can do other things than make calls, has a "flight mode" where radio transmitters are swithed off while periferal functions are kept active. This one doesn't. Not that it mattered much - I couldn't use the player anyway and simply turned it off and read the darn book instead, listening to screaming kids and jet engines. Not entirely unlike reading a book listening to Einstürzende Neubauten those 25 years ago.