Sections
- Page 1 Alcatel OneTouch 20.05 Review
- Page 2 Interface, calling and browser Review
- Page 3 Camera, Battery Life and Verdict Review
Alcatel OneTouch 20.05 – Interface and Usability
The Alcatel OneTouch 20.05’s menu system has obviously been heavily influenced by Nokia’s interface for its Series 40 phones. It looks almost identical. For example, the homescreen shows the current day, time and date, and there’s a widget across the bottom to give you quick access to features like the SMS messaging client, call log, camera, music player and FM radio.
When you open the main menu you’re greeted by a colourful, scrollable grid of icons for the various mini apps and settings screens. It’s all very straightforward and easy to use and the phone feels quiet responsive too, when you’re opening and closing the various menu screens and apps.
Alcatel OneTouch 20.05 – Contacts, Browser and Calling
The Alcatel OneTouch 20.05’s contacts book is reasonably good by budget phone standards. You can add multiple different numbers, such as mobile, home and work numbers to a contact card as well as entering birthday information. You can also segment contacts into different groups if you want.
Alcatel has added a few extra quirky calling features. The first is the Call Filter that lets you set up either a whitelist or blacklist of numbers. Any calls from numbers on the blacklist are automatically ignored by the phone, while those on the Whitelist are always allowed through. The second feature is the Fake Call. Here you can enter a fake caller’s name and set a time in advance for the fake call to ring — handy if you’re on a boring date and need an excuse to leave.
The phone’s call quality is very good. The earpiece is reasonably loud and as a result comfortable to use outdoors on busy streets and the like, and the mic seems to do a good job of delivering intelligible speech too. Certainly, none of the people we contacted while using the phone complained about poor call quality or muffled speech.
This phone lacks email support, but it does have a browser onboard. The browser is not very easy to use, though. Tapping in web addresses via the keypad is annoying and the lack of 3G support means pages are extremely slow to load. It automatically reformats sites to fit the screen, but even with that, the browsing experience is poor, so if you want a phone for everyday browsing this is not the one to choose.
How we test phones
We test every mobile phone we review thoroughly. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly and we use the phone as our main device over the review period. We’ll always tell you what we find and we never, ever, accept money to review a product.
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We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
