Alcatel OT-S319 review

Like its stable-mate the OT-V212, the OT-S319 is unlikely to win any awards for its name, but it does at least lend itself easily to being described as a classic cheap and cheerful phone.

The cheap bit, is on account of its £20 price tag, available from everyone's favourite British high-street retailer, Woolies. The cheerful has to do with its quite frankly outrageous livery, which, to say the least, is not for the faint-hearted. It's a truly spectacular combination of glossy purple and vivid lime green and while either one of those colours alone would have been hard to take, together it's something of an assault on the senses.

The blurb on the Woolworths web site described it as 'funky' and to our surprise a colleague picked up this phone from the desk and described it using exactly the same word, so there may be something in it.

The soap-like clamshell shape will appeal to younger hands, as it's small and curvy. That said, we would be a little wary to leave the S319 in sight of small children lest they pick it up and try and eat the thing, mistaking it for a sweet.

The build is inevitably not quite up to the standard of a premium phone, but considering the price of the handset, that's hardly going to be a surprise. Even so, it seems a perfectly reasonably assembled piece of plastic. It's tiny at 90.5x4.5x18mm and the so the device fits comfortably in the hand.

A design fault means the lid of the clamshell doesn't fit snugly against the bottom of the phone.Three shortcut button set into the trip along the bottom of the handset. These are for switching between profiles, including activating the vibration function, reviewing recent call history and opening the contacts menu. The middle button flashes when you have a unread text message or an incoming call. The default text message sound is a pleasant harp strum, but the default ring tone sounds like the theme tune to the X-Factor, which is enough to make you want to stamp on the thing right there. Other ring tones are available - all of which are awful.

The lid opens up with a watery 'plop' sound effect, to reveal a small display. The manufacturer's web site for the phone doesn't list the number of pixels or the number of colours for the display, but it's clearly not very many of either. It has a washed out look and suffers from light bleed all round the edges. You won't want to be using it to show off pictures to friends but that said, there's no camera on the back, so you'd have a job getting pictures onto it anyway.

There's 2MB of memory on board and it does support MP3 ringtones so you could theoretically download them over WAP.

The phone has a conventional keypad layout, with an OK button for making selections surrounding by a directional pad, with call and end keys below and soft keys above, mimicking the layout of a Sony Ericsson.  A right-click on the directional pad brings up the volume menu, as there are no controls on the exterior. The keys themselves are rubber and are generally fine to use, though I did find that the top two buttons tapered too much at the top and simply weren't large enough to press cleanly -and as a result you tend to press the directional button at the same time, which can mess up what you're trying to do.

As you'd expect for the price, spec-wise there's little to write home about. Compared to something like the N96, this is as far away in the evolutionary chain as say, Stephen Fry is to Kerry Katona. However you will find an FM radio, and even a couple of games, Chuck Egg and UFO, that have some retro appeal – time passers for the bus stop wait. The phone is, naturally enough, GPRS only, sporting WAP capabilities in a 2002 kind of way. However, browsing the BBC web site using the WAP browser was a sluggish time-warp journey I'd rather not repeat.

Of course, for a handset costing £20 you wouldn't expect Wi-Fi, but the absence of Bluetooth is a little disappointing. For data transfer there is a MiniUSB port for power, which is useful as the cable doubles up as a charger. Being the radical types that we are, we even made calls on the phone, and had no complaints on the call quality side of things.

Being so light on features, it's no surprise that the 700mAh battery can be made to last for what seems like an eternity of standby, and we can believe the 400 hour standby figure quoted.

The Alcatel S319 could be a perfect, dirt cheap disposable phone that won't attract too much attention, save for the problem of its radioactive-coloured casing. If you're looking for a first mobile for a son or daughter, or want something brash that you don't mind losing down the pub, then you can't really go wrong with this perfectly serviceable, and even slightly charming little phone.