Alcatel One Touch Star unveiled with midrange price & specifications

TCL wants the Alcatel brand to be to smartphones what Archos is to tablets, apparently. That is – signify extremely cheap devices that are, however, decently specced. Or something like that. The Chinese masters of the Alcatel brand also like to do some showing off, such as at CES when they announced no less than 13 new mobile devices. Sitting pretty on top of that pile was the One Touch Idol, the company's newest flagship smartphone.

Alcatel One Touch Star

TCL has just unveiled its latest smartphone. The Alcatel One Touch Star is a mid-range handset with a stylish design and extremely attractive price tag that we are hoping to see showcased at the MWC in two weeks. Interestingly though, the One Touch Star wasn't among those. Yet it's bound to appear on the European market soon. Before you get too excited, know that this will be a lower-midrange offering and nothing more. In Sweden, it will retail for around 2,000 SEK, which is about €234 or $315. That's an unsubsidized price, of course. So let us see what will you get for that price.

• a 4-inch 480×800 touchscreen,
• a 5 MP rear camera with LED flash,
• a VGA front-facing camera,
• a dual-core 1 GHz processor with 512 MB of RAM,
• 4 GB of internal storage space (with 2.4 GB available to the user),
• a microSD card slot,
• HSPA,
• Wi-Fi,
• GPS,
• Bluetooth 4.0
• a 1,500 mAh battery, and
• it runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

Surprisingly, the device will run on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, which is still pretty rare to be found in the mid-range.

Alcatel One Touch Star

Alcatel will probably showcase this device at Mobile World Congress in a couple of weeks, so we'll know all the official details then. For now, it looks to be yet another completely forgettable midrange offering that's not very cheap, nor very interesting for other reasons, and which almost certainly won't ever be updated to another version of Android. Alcatel One Touch Star will retail for around 2,000 SEK (about $315 or €234) in Sweden and is expected to be available in European markets very soon.  
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