Absolute Gadget

Review: Alcatel OT-C701 music phone

Written by Matt Chapman Thursday, 27 September 2007 02:28

At first site the Alcatel OT-C701 looks like a cracker (our review model is jet black, not the nuclear orange of the press shot we've included in this review). The clamshell design may be a little quaint these days compared with modern slider phones, but it’s still small enough to look like it warrants a place in your pocket.

Its best features are wrapped up in the fact that this is also a dedicated music phone. The outside of the phone sports Forward, Back and Play buttons so you don’t have to open the clamshell to change your tunes. The scrolling outer display also lets you know what track and artist is currently warbling in your shell-like.

The box contains a pair of miniUSB headphones that double as a handsfree kit. The sound they pass onto your ears is better than you’d expect from a bit of freebie audio kit. The only downside is that the leakage will reach nearby people (such as those in the next seat on the Tube) if you crank them up too loudly.

Once you get inside the phone, things aren’t so attractive. Looking at the animated menus that greet you in the main directory, you can’t help but feel the phone’s a little dated. And trawling through the different options, the text looks unfinished, the style looks kiddie and the whole interface lacks the polished feel most modern mobiles have today.

That feeling carries on when you install the Alcatel PC Suite software. With a copyright date of 2002-2007, it’s easy to imagine during the installation that the interface hasn’t been updated since that first year. We also had major problems getting the PC Suite to work. The error message “You must be logged in to Windows as an administrator when using this program” refused to disappear even though we are set up as the Windows administrator of our PC thank you very much. This problem continued despite repeatedly logging in and out of Windows, reinstalling the software and restarting the machine.

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Thankfully, it’s possible to add content to the phone using the miniSD slot provided (our method of choice even if there hadn’t been difficulties). The device also shows up as a removable USB drive in the My Computer menu if you want to add songs that way. Simply choose the Mass Storage option on the phone screen when you first connect it. Other options when you plug it into your PC allow you to charge the phone over the USB connection or use the camera as a webcam.

While the interface might look dated, the phone options at least offer everything you’d expect. A camera takes images and video, and there’s email functionality and mobile internet access. There are also a number of useful apps such as calculator, currency converter and voice memo.

The phone only has an internal capacity of 10MB – which shows how spoiled we are today that this seems disappointing – but, as mentioned, there is the option to add a miniSD card. It comes with a list of ringtones – mostly bordering on the cheesy to the ridiculous. Thankfully, you can choose to have any of the MP3 files stored on your phone or your miniSD card as your ringtone.

This being a music phone the associated software is as fully-featured as you’d expect. It supports playlists so you can stack your tunes how you want and there’s even a shuffle mode so you don’t have to listen to albums or artists in the usual sequence. A useful ‘Play in Bluetooth’ mode allows you to quickly open a connection for wireless headphones. A choice of equalizer (Dance, Pop, Rock, etc) rounds out a decent music set-up.

Our least favourite feature is the noise the phone makes when you open and close it. Whoever thought making it sound like a big drip of water inside a horror movie house needs to think about what they’ve done (one of our colleagues described it as sounding like “the noise a poo makes hitting the water in a toilet”). All our efforts to turn this sound off were fruitless – unless you want to turn all the sound off including the ringtone by putting the OT-C701 into silent mode.

Overall
If all you want to do is listen to music on a relatively small handset then the Alcatel OT-C701 will suffice. We can especially see it being bought as a cheap music phone for younger members of the family. But if you have a little more to spend there are prettier and more accomplished dedicated music models out there.

Verdict: 5/10