So, you’re looking at the top-of-the-line BlackBerry 9700 and thinking, £400 is a bit out of your price range for something with a keyboard.

Okay, there's quite a bit more on offer with the BlackBerry compared to the Alcatel Tribe, but you can get this phone for £50, which is quite a substantial difference.

So, what are the key differences? How much will you have to compromise by saving all of that wedge? Well, the Tribe doesn’t give you 3G, Wi-Fi, GPS, an autofocus 3.2-megapixel camera, flash or instant email - but you do get a perfectly respectable web browser, email client, instant messaging, a 2-megapixel camera, stereo Bluetooth and a memory card slot. In other words, while it might not have the absolutely top spec, it’s no disappointment.

The Tribe has a QVGA-resolution screen, and a full QWERTY keyboard that mimics that of any BlackBerry Curve or Bold, as well as the many other contenders - like Nokia’s budget E63, INQ Mobile’s Chat 3G or the Genio Qwerty.

In fact, there's a lot of competition in this end of the market, so usability and speed play an important role in helping decide one from another. The keys are firm, but domed in a way that allows you to enter text with a fair degree of accuracy. The menus are bright and colourful, and fast to navigate. The phone is considerably faster to navigate around than a INQ Chat 3G.

It’s worth noting that, while the handset is marginally larger than a Bold 9700, there isn’t much in it. The different colour options of the Tribe should also make it more appealing, as well as more socially acceptable than a phone normally associated with people in suits.

Unlike some of the rival budget keyboard-equipped handsets, there’s no dedicated Facebook or Twitter application and no sign of Skype. Yet there is a weather forecast application and an RSS newsreader. For Instant Messaging, the phone comes with the Palringo app, which supports most IM services, like Windows Live, Facebook, Google talk and AIM.

On the email side, you can hook up with any POP3 or IMAP email account and access your social networking sites via the standard web sites.

To get on the web, you’d be silly to use the standard browser in preference to Opera Mini, which can show the web in a normal desktop view, zooming in and reflowing text accordingly as you navigate. Opera Mini also compresses pages, allowing them to download quicker and reducing your data usage.

You can also synchronise your bookmarks with the desktop version of Opera. With the respectable screen resolution, web browsing might not be as slick as an iPhone but it is nothing like web browsing on most budget models.

The camera is probably the big disappointment here, with a tiny little 2-megapixel sensor struggling to cope in all but the best lighting conditions. Photos feature laods of noise, with a noticeable shutter lag that means you’ll need to plan ahead to get the shot you want. Afterwards, you can send them over Bluetooth or copy them to your PC.

<< Previous 1 2 Next>>

Alcatel has never has a strong reputation, mainly because its devies are low spec, super-cheap phones that are only available on one network. Before the demise of Woolworths, you could pick an Alcatel phone up for less than £10, although now the French manufacturer has stepped up its game.

The Alcatel OT-708 One Touch Mini is a full touchscreen handset. In fact there are no hardware keys in sight - even the buttons below the screen are touch sensitive, and highly responsive at that.

There's nothing fancy within the screen technology - it's resistive so the iPhone users of you will find you'll need to press a little harder when using it. There's also no swiping function or multitouch, but who needs such complicated features when the screen's only 2.4-inches?

The homescreen on the Alcatel OT-708 One Touch Mini looks pretty familiar - it's almost identical those on LG's S Class and Samsung's TouchWiz UIs, with widgets appearing on a panel on the left side and bottom panel.

To make these panels appear and disappear, simply tap the left or centre touch sensitive lights below the screen. To add widgets to the homescreen for speedy access, drag and drop them to where you'd like them to be. The selection of widgets available are pretty limited compared to other widget-based UIs, but the most used are there, including a calendar, music player and weather application. Probably the most handy of all is the missed calls/new text messages widget that collates any new actions in one place.

Enter the menu by pressing the right hand cluser of touchscreen buttons and you're taken to a three-part menu. These are colour coded, each to represent a different aspect of life. The far left coloured button is for utilties and includes links to the calendar, calculator and settings. The central menu helps you keep up to date with communication, so texts and the phonebook. This is the first you're taken to when hitting the menu button from the homescreen. The final menu is for multimedia and takes you to the camera, gallery and music player.

What did surprise us with the Alcatel OT-708 One Touch Mini was the applications setting, where you can download apps and access the eBook reader. Applications are currently pretty limited - when you click on the link to download applications, you're taken to a web page where the only option we found was Opera Mini. Below the applications icon is the link to the eBook reader. To view any books in the eBook reader, you'll have to download eBooks elsewhere, and the screen is a little too small to comfortably read a book, but it's a nice attempt by Alcatel to enter the applications game.

Multimedia-wise, Alcatel has scrimped slightly. Although never known for the most high-tech features, a 1.3-megapixel camera is disappointing. the quality of the snaps are grainy and suffer from poor effects in low lighting - not really surprising considering there's no flash or autofocus.

The music player is pretty basic too, and there's no 3.5mm headphone jack in sight. An FM radio is included, but the bundled stereo headset doubles as a receiver for this, and we wouldn't consider it to be the most comfortable set of earphones we've tested.

Other corners cut include the data capabilities. Although there is GPRS connectivity, a small boost from even Edge would be bonus. After all, how are we to make use of the browser (albeit basic) Alcatel has kindly provided us with when we only have GPRS to play with?

The Alcatel OT-708 One Touch Mini may not be the most advanced in its game, but it's pretty impressive for Alcatel's first endeavour into the touchscreen space. The UI is simple to use, especially when the widgets come into play and you get used to the touch sensitive buttons changing depending on which application you're using.

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.

You pretty much know what you’re going to be getting with a mobile phone when you receive jewellery in the box. When we opened the tiny box of the Alcatel V212 Zebra, two coloured bangles dropped out; they would probably only fit on a 12-year old's wrist. And yes, the handset is most definitely looks based, and would fit nicely in the pocket of a 12-year-old.

The first thing that you'll have to acknowledge about the Alcatel OT-V212 is that it is cheap – you can pick it up for fifteen quid, ‘exclusively’ at Woolworths, and is only available as prepay. And that’s how you’re going to have to judge it - anything that cheap isn’t exactly going to be a multimedia marvel.

The V212 itself does look like the sort of thing that you might be able to pick up at a toy store – one of those things that you might have played with as a five year old after your mum decided that it wasn’t a good idea to let you play with a real mobile phone.

But if you can get past the cheap plastic casing and the zebra-print patterning, it’s not so bad to hold. The phone is very small and can be easily carried around, without you knowing is there. And funnily enough the plastic gives it a certain robustness.

The Alcatel V212 Zebra is a basic, solid phone which reminds us of early Nokia in its feel, but is smaller than they were. It’s simple and user-friendly, and the keypad is fairly fine to use, although with repeated use might lead to discomfort because you are basically just pressing bits of cheap plastic.

However there’s no getting around the fact that the OT-V212 lacks any kind of 21st century specification. It’s only dual-band, and you won’t be able to surf the web or take photos without Internet or a camera. The only things that it can do effectively is call and text, although it does offer a colour screen.

What it does offer isn’t bad for the price – five hours talk time and 400 hours stand by battery is good enough for a phone of this type, and there is a FM radio for entertainment. However the sound quality is poor and you’ll need to be outside in order to get decent reception.

The 65k, 1.5-inch internal screen is adequate and is quite brightly lit, but the phone’s limitations mean that you’re there’s no prospect for the downloading of games here, and even if there was it is unlikely to be able to handle anything. The only game available is a functional version of the game ‘Tetris’.

Most people going to Woolworths to pick up a prepay phone for little more than a tenner will fully know what they are going to get, and the OT-V212 does all the basic things you want from a phone well, and offers space for about 250 text messages and 255 names. There are also some pretty funky ringtones as well as standard alarm and calendar.

In these days of the credit crunch and tightened budgets, a low-end phone with this sort of price is probably a necessity. From the styling and way the phone has been marketed it has definitely been released with children and younger teenagers in mind, as most parents will not mind spending £15 on a phone.

Any older than about 12 and I would say a teen would have problems with buying the OT-V212. Mobile phones are a form of status, and even though Virgin seems to be working hard on the styling, no cool kid in their right mind would touch a phone like this. It lacks all the specs that they would demand and the lack of a camera would be a real problem for most.

But anybody (child or adult) who is after a basic phone which does the job it’s expected to do without all the bells and whistles could do worse than to choose the OT-V212. You can make calls and text with no problems, while the construction of the phone is quite solid and its small size does suit a lot of people. But don’t bring this phone out in front of users obsessed with specs, as you’ll get laughed at down the street.

Covered in butterflies, it’s the perfect first phone for six-year-old girls.

Not everyone wants an iPhone. Some people just want a phone that makes calls and sends texts. And that’s the market Alcatel and Orange are going for with the OT-E227 Butterflies – simple to use but cute looking.

No camera, no web browsing, no music player – it might sound hard to imagine, but it has none of these now-standard features. This most basic of phones does just that: the basics, like making calls. It has none of the features found on standard mobile handsets in these technologically advanced times.

It does, however, come in pink with a butterfly-flower-heart exterior, making it the perfect first phone for six-year-old little girls – and even their harassed mums who can’t be bothered to get into gadgets. (I don’t mean to suggest men aren’t harassed and all like gadgets, but you’d have to be pretty secure with yourself to pull this pink device out in front of the guys.)

This cheap-and-cheerful clamshell is designed for people not wanting any extras – and those not wanting such extras for their kids.  It’s only available on prepay, and it comes in at just £10, when you buy £10 credit on top. And you’re definitely getting what you pay for in this instance.

The 70g clamshell comes in soft pink with a hearts, flowers and butterfly motif – hence the name. The sides and hinge are a soft grey and the overall affect is actually cute rather than horrifyingly garish. One side features a LED lights for call alerts, and a light is built into the top of the case, blinking through the butterflies when a message comes in.

It also features a USB socket for charging. While an icon suggests USB-jack headphone use, it has no music player, which is a shame when you consider other, highly budget devices feature even a simple java application to cater for this. It is a relief though if you're on the bus and the unruly teenager sitting next to you has one of these - there's no way they can play muic through the speaker at full volume.

Flipped open, the interior is the same soft grey with a basic keypad – just numbers, navigation and a great big ‘ok’ button. The keypad lights up red at the touch of any button and it’s nice and simple to tap out a quick SMS on the wide keys, which emit a satisfying beep reminiscent of old-school portable phones.

The 1.5-inch TFT 65K colour screen is nice and bright, and the white-rimmed black text easy to read, if a bit retro. There’s a setting for the phone’s own number to pop up on the screen, just in case you want to circulate it quickly round friends.

The main menu screen features three icons down the side, offering easy access to the usual suspects – contacts, messages… and a strange squiggle, which sets the alarm, diary events and ring tone to silent.

Otherwise, access to calls and other tools require flipping through the standard icon-based menu system. The phone offers limited tools, just an alarm, calculator and very basic diary. Display settings are also basic, with a choice of two wallpapers and seven colour-based profiles – the green is particularly alarming.

The OT-E227 also comes equipped with two games, the Tetris-style Russia and the Pong-style Bricks, so you can pass your time with some entertainment.

According to the Orange site, it’s dual band meaning you can use it in Europe, but nowhere further afield. It also promises ten hours of talk time, with 12 hours on standby.

And that’s… pretty much it. No camera, MP3 player, storage, web browser – but it makes calls and looks kinda cute, if you’re six and you like ponies. You’re getting what you pay for, but then you probably already knew that.

All in, it’s designed for first-time mobile users. With the pink-theme, it’s great for little girls but it’s slick enough that it’s an okay choice for women who aren’t into gadgets.