At their press event the other night, Alcatel surprised all by bringing the luxurious 18:9 aspect ratio screens down into the low and mid-range phone market with the Alcatel 1, 3 and 5 series phones. Also announced at the event were a pair of new tablets, the Alcatel 1T which will be available in both 7″ and 10″ screen sizes.
The star attraction of the announcement is that both tablets are running Android 8.1 (Oreo) out of the box. They include some Alcatel customisations including a ‘kids’ mode which allows parents to control which apps their kids can access and the amount of time they can spend playing on the tablet.
In terms of hardware, they’re budget friendly, powered by a Mediatek processor with 1GB of RAM. The 7″ tablet will have 8GB of on-board storage while the 10″ model will come with 16GB, though both have a microSD card slot to add a microSD card to. They have decently bright IPS LCD displays, with 1024×600 resolution for the 7″ model, and 1280×800 for the 10″.
| Alcatel1T 7 | Alcatel 1T 10 | Screen size | 7.0-inch | 10-inch | Screen technology | IPS LCD | IPS LCD | Resolution | 1,024 x 600 | 1,280 x 800 | PPI | — | — | Rear camera | 2MP | 2MP | Front camera | VGA | 2MP | Chipset | Mediatek MT8321A/D | Mediatek MT8321 | Core config | 4 x 1.3GHz | 4 x 1.3GHZ | Ram | 1GB | 1GB | Storage | 8GB | 16GB | MicroSD | Yes, up to 128GB | Yes, up to 128GB | Battery | 2,580 mAh | 4,000 mAh | Battery removable | — | — | Connector | MicroUSB | MicroUSB | Cellular | — | — | NFC | — | — | Android OS | Android 8.1 | Android 8.1 | Vendor skin | — | — | Dimensions | 189.5 x 111 x 9.15 | 255 x 155 x 9.35 | Weight | 245g | 415g | Colours | Black | Black | Accessories | — | — |
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In the hand, the tablets are pretty comfortable to hold with a soft-touch plastic backing on them. They’re not too heavy, so you can hold them for a while to watch movies, play some games or even read a book on. They should be priced fairly inexpensively as well when they arrive in the market.
Alcatel 1T 7″
Alcatel 1T 10″
There’s no announcements in terms of local availability, but Alcatel has been selling some of their Pixi branded tablets in the carrier stores for a while now and it’s possible we could see these in there as either a replacement or alongside.
I don’t care how “budget friendly” they are, there is ZERO excuse for a modern device to have less than 16GB of memory. We made the mistake of buying a similar tablet for my son and I am constantly having to manage the storage, regardless of the presence of a micro SD card.