Alcatel Launches Blaze Line Of Budget Droids–Cheaper If You Buy This Month

August 11 00:33 2011 by Alexei Rivera Print This Article

Alcatel recently invited us to attend the launch for three new products in their line of affordable mobile phones. The phones are part of the new Blaze line – which are the newest Android smartphones from the French manufacturer. The top dog spec-wise of these three would be the Alcatel OneTouch Blaze 990, which we recently reviewed here. And the two others would be the OneTouch Blaze 906 – a single SIM Froyo touchscreen device; and the OneTouch Blaze 890D – with the ‘D’ signifying its dual-SIM capabilities. We’ll give you the lowdown on the specs and prices after the jump. The good news? None of these phones will sell for more than PHP 10k – at least for the month of August.

OneTouch Blaze 990

The Blaze 990 needs no introduction, does it? We’ve kind of featured it heavily on our website for the past few weeks. Here’s our unboxing, and here’s our review. We found it to be a pretty cool piece of kit – 4/5 stars in fact. (At least given you buy it at the introductory price.) To run it down, you have an Android 2.2 Froyo phone with some small customization touches that we like. There’s a rather large 3.5” capacitive screen with a resolution of 320×480. There’s a 600Mhz processor and we found that the internal GPU can handle Angry Birds and some 3D games like Fruit Slice pretty well. Rounding that off you have a 5MP Camera, LED flash, and a front-facing VGA snapper. Oh, and we found the speakers to be particularly loud. Something that’s lacking in pretty much all smartphones today. Colors available are Red, Bluish Black, and Aubergine. The phone is supposed to retail for PHP 14,999, which we’re not too excited about – thankfully the introductory price goes down by 5 grand down to PHP 9,999. And at that price, it’s a bargain.

OneTouch Blaze 906

Next up is some sort of mystery phone. Why? Because there’s not a lot of info about this device circling around on the internet. It runs on Android 2.2 Froyo, has a 2.8” touchscreen at 240×320 resolution, has 3G capabilities, 2MP Camera, and the usual connectivity options. What we don’t know is the processor speed. And from what we can tell the screen is resistive. Thankfully, the price is at a relatively low budget of PHP 6,399 during the introductory period. (The original SRP is quoted at PHP 7,999.) We’re interested to see more of this phone, at least to unravel its mystery. (Plus, the finish of that plastic looks interesting.) Your color choices include orange, and the dark titanium gray above.

OneTouch Blaze 890D

Finally we have the Blaze 890D. It’s a low spec dual-SIM Android phone that is the cheapest of them all. Settling at a price of PHP 4,999 during the introductory offer (SRP is PHP 6,299), it’s currently competing for the cheapest Android device available locally. It’s an Android 2.2 running device with a 420Mhz processor, 2.8” 240×320 resolution resistive screen, 2MP camera, and WiFi, among other connectivity options. It can standby with two SIMs at once, but doesn’t have any 3G antennas for fast data connections through your telco’s mobile internet. (You’ll need to use 2G.) Still for budget users who want a taste of Android and need an extra SIM slot, this just might be for you. Colors come in the Fushia above, Orange, and steel grey.

Alcatel also offers a lot of non-Android phones to total their lineup of 16 phones currently available in the Philippines. All of them are under this month’s introductory prices. They’ve announced that they plan to have 20 units available by the end of this year. So we’re looking forward to see what they’ll be up to in a few months. For now, check out your local retailers for these Androids and other phones in Alcatel’s lineup.

For more pictures of the event, check out the gallery below.

		Alcatel OneTouch Blaze Series Launch VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL