14 DAY TRIAL // Alcatel announced its One Touch Pop Series of smartphones exactly one year ago at Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2013 and a few more budget-friendly devices in the same lineup last autumn at IFA 2013.
Today, the company expanded the One Touch Pop series with a brand new Android smartphone, the Pop C9. Although this particular lineup of smartphones is aimed at the entry-level market, some of the handsets come with excellent features considering their price.
Alcatel One Touch POP C9 is no exception to the rule and even though it provides all the features specific to mid-range smartphones, it’s still a solid choice for those looking to buy a cheaper phablet.
As Phonearena points out, the strong point of the device is the large 5.5-inch qHD (540 x 960 pixels) IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen display that puts it in the phablet category.
The One Touch POP C9 is equipped with a more than decent 1.3 GHz quad-core processor, most likely provided by MediaTek. It also packs 1GB of RAM, 4GB of internal memory and microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB).
On the back, the mid-range Android smartphone sports an 8-meapixel photo snapper with autofocus, LED flash and HD video recording, while in the front, there’s a secondary 2-megapixel camera for video calls.
Given the large display, Alcatel One Touch POP C9 is powered by a high-capacity 2500 mAh Li-Ion battery, which should provide up to 8 hours of talk time (4 hours in 3G mode).
According to Alcatel, the smartphone will ship with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean operating system out of the box and is likely to stay on this version until it reaches end of life status.
Connectivity-wise, the One Touch POP C9 offers both 3G and 2G support, along with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, microUSB and GPS with A-GPS.
Unfortunately, Alcatel did not offer any details on price and availability yet, but we suspect that the smartphone may arrive at T-Mobile USA pretty soon. Stay tuned for more updates on this one.