The Alcatel One Touch 735 is a reasonable mid-range mobile handset, let down by a very basic problem. Read our Australian review.The Alcatel One Touch 735 is a sleek metallic mobile with a reasonable screen. The screen is 128x128 pixels, which is good for a pure mobile phone. It has 4,096 colours, but is fairly dim and hard to see in strong light. The handset is an average size for a mobile, measuring 106 x 47 x 19.5 mm and weighing 89 grams.
The layout of the buttons is standard, with two softkeys and a five-way navigation joystick. One unusual aspect is that the answer call button and the hang-up button are the same. The other button - apart from the number pad - is the power button, which doubles up as clear.
There is an additional button in the top left-hand corner, which is used during games and to bring up the services menu. The camera is located on the back of the phone, and has a small mirror beside it for taking pictures of yourself.
There are nine folders accessible from the main menu: directory, messages, customize, tools, events, WAP, services, games, media album and camera. Most of these are self-explanatory – the directory is the phone book, messages takes you to SMS, EMS, MMS and voice messages and so on. There's a couple of differences, such as the 'template' messages being referred to as 'canned messages'; and the events folder, which seems to tell you all the things that have happened to the phone recently, in terms of people trying to contact you.
The camera doesn't respond well to fast movement, taking a few seconds to focus. However, it does allow you to take pictures in six different sizes, ranging from 16x16 pixels to 352 x 288 pixels, and including a panoramic shot. There are also three different shooting options to choose from: single pictures, animation and mosaic. Animation will take four consecutive pictures you take and display them one after the other, while mosaic will take the four pictures and present them in a square. The joystick can be moved to zoom the picture in and out slightly, and change the exposure.
The camera also has 22 frames which can be included in the picture, three choices of image quality, a ten second timer, and five different exposure settings to choose from. The exposure modes seemed a little arbitrary in our testing -- the same picture taken with "sunny" and "cloudy" seemed to be more orange than the "indoor", "night" and "automatic", and that was about all the perceptible difference these settings made.
Finally, there are five different colour options to choose from: Color, Black and White, Sepia, Negative and Thin. All in all the One Touch has a wide variety of pictures which can be taken, although we're not sure how much effort most people want to go to with a camera phone.
The One Touch 735 has SMS and MMS capabilities – which are pretty standard on mobiles. Although the mobile has predictive text, prepare to be frustrated at the beginning. We found the dictionary to be deficient, with words such as "hello", "think" and "in" not included. Perhaps more annoying, when we entered "in" into the dictionary, we lost "go". We kept "in-law", however, which we found less useful. There's possibly a way around this, but we didn't find it in our reviewing period. The phone does include French and Italian dictionaries, but we feel a more complete English one would be a better fit for the Australian market.
MMS's were easy to create on the One Touch 735, allowing you to add images, sound and text in multiple pages easily. Of course, the text suffered the same problems as the SMS text. You can also send the message to a single person or a group.
There are several ways to customise the Alcatel 735. There are a large number of polyphonic ringtones to choose from, including a fairly eclectic selection. If you want the sound of a wet cat, or a deep voice going "yo", or some wannabe rap artist shouting "Say Yeah! Say Yeah!" as your ringtone, this is the phone for you.
There are a number of different colours and 'atmospheres' you can set the One Touch to, which changes the visual look of the menus, and there are a number of images you can set as wallpaper. The mobile also allows you to set animations as the wallpaper -- although to be honest these are just four stills played after one another. There are other nifty features, such as the ability to change the size of the text, change the menu from icons to images to board, and create voice commands and hotkeys.
You can create your own ringtone using the melody creator. It is reasonably easy to use -- providing a music score to compose on, but the resulting tones didn't seem to match what we'd put in the phone. Mind you, it has been a good decade since we went to any kind of music class. You can also choose what type of instrument you want to hear, which adds to the fun.
There are three games loaded onto the phone, and the ability to download some more. You have to turn the phone onto its side to play the games, using the four-way joystick and the "game button" at the top of the phone. The games are good and offer a variety of game styles. Panko is a puzzle game which involves pushing crates into correct places on a floor, Mutant Alert is a first person shooter and Wall Breaker is the old classic involving bricks that are destroyed by a ball you bounce.
The phone supports GPRS, and comes with some links to WAP services offered by Alcatel. The phone has infrared connectivity. The battery life is advertised as 260 hours standby time or 6 hours 30 minutes talk time, which is reasonable for a mobile.
The Alcatel One Touch 735 is a reasonable mid-range phone, especially if you're not a keen message user. If you often use your mobile for sending SMS and rarely for taking pictures, you'd probably want to look at a different handset.
Alcatel One Touch 735
Company: Alcatel
Price: AU$400
Distributor: Optus World
Phone: 133 999
HEY GUYS, YOU ARE DISSING THE PHONE BECAUSE YOU ARE JUST TOO LAZY 2 TYPE YOUR MESSAGES THE OLD FASHION WAY! I OWN A ALCATEL 735 AND I SEND A LOT OF SMS's FROM IT. NO PROBLEMS MATE! PREDICTIVE TEXT IS FOR LAZY PEOPLE!