Verdict

Pros

• Facebook and Twitter apps
• Long battery life
• Bright screen
• Extremely low price tag

Cons

• Lacks Wi-Fi and 3G support
• Poor quality FM tuner
• Terrible for web browsing

What is the Alcatel OneTouch 20.05?

The Alcatel OneTouch 20.05 is primarily targeted at teenagers who haven’t got a big enough pocket-money allowance to buy one of the cheap Android phones on the market. Available for under £25 from O2 on PAYG, it’s essentially an old-school feature phone, but one that also has basic apps onboard for Facebook and Twitter.

Alcatel OneTouch 20.05 – Design

The Alcatel OneTouch 20.05 is quite a fun looking phone. O2 offers it in turquoise and red, both of which look quite striking and help it stand out from the crowd. The case is made entirely from plastic, but Alcatel has used good-looking chrome beading around the front face of the handset as well as on the direction pad, and the slightly sloping edges at the top and bottom also add to its visual appeal.

The flat keys on the keypad look like they’ll be a bit uncomfortable to use for texting, but in reality their large size and the distinctive click they make when pressed means that you can actually get up a good speed for texting without ending up with sore fingers and thumbs.

Charging and syncing is via the micro USB port that’s found towards the bottom right hand edge of the phone and there’s a standard headphone jack at the top for listening to music or the onboard FM tuner via the supplied headphones. The phone uses a microSIM that sit sin a slot on the left hand edge, and there’s a microSD memory card slot under the battery cover. You’ll need to make use of this, as the phone only has around 1MB of storage space free out of the box.

Alcatel OneTouch 20.05 – Screen

The Alcatel OneTouch 20.05 is essentially a traditional candybar phone, so its screen is much smaller than those that you’ll find on today’s smartphones. It also doesn’t support touch, so you can’t navigate through the phones menu system by just dabbing at the display with your finger. The screen measures a mere 2.4-inches, and has a lowly resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. However, because it’s so small the screen actually looks reasonably sharp.

Viewing angles aren’t bad on the horizontal axis, but if you tilt the phone towards you at a more acute angle the screen does darken considerably. Nevertheless, that’s not an ideal angle for using the phone anyway, so you’re unlikely to notice this on a day to day basis. What’s more important is that the screen is very bright and easy to read outdoors, even on sunnier days.