14 DAY TRIAL // Alcatel-Lucent, the French giant telecoms company, has recently released a new mobile phone for the UK market, named Alcatel OT-S520. The OT-S520 is an entry-level device that comes in a pretty good-looking candybar form factor and has a price of only 19.99 GBP (about 40 USD or 25 Euros).
[admark=1]Obviously, in this price users will not get too many features, but for those who only need a basic phone, the new Alcatel seems to be a good option. The OT-S520 packs a 1.8 inch display with 65K colors and 128 x 160 pixels, a VGA camera with video recording, dual-band GSM connectivity with GPRS, WAP and HTML browsers, MP3 and polyphonic ringtones, speakerphone, handsfree, USB, pre-installed games, T9 predictive text input, calendar, calculator, alarm clock and currency converter. Sadly, there's no FM radio or any other music-related features.
The candybar embeds 2MB of internal memory plus and extra 1MB to stock the photos you take with the VGA camera. The OT-S520 does not include a memory expansion slot, so you'll have to drastically limit the data amount you carry inside the OT-S520.
Although it's very slim and lightweight, measuring 103 x 44.9 x 10.9 millimeters and weighing only 69 grams, Alcatel OT-S520 has quite a powerful battery that should last up to 10 hours in talk-time mode and up to 400 hours in stand-by mode.
For the moment, the new and basic Alcatel candybar is available only in the UK and only from Virgin Mobile, offered by the online retailer Woolworths. There is no word yet on whether Alcatel-Lucent will release the new affordable handset in other countries too, but the OT-S520 could be successful in emerging markets like the Indian one.