I’m down at Africa Com today, a big event in Cape Town for the mobile industry, and there’s a lot of phones here. Cheap phones, expensive phones, Chinese phones and this very interesting French one.
Alcatel may be best known for its budget and white label handsets – it launched an R699 smartphone just last week – but the one that caught my eye is this: the One Touch Hero. It’s a big ol’ six incher with a 1080p screen that uses OLED technology, just like its obvious Samsung Galaxy Note rival. It comes with a stylus and, in my humble, it’s the best tablet in terms of the way it sits in your hand outside the Note too. Light, thin and exceedingly comfortable, there’s some Gallic design magic going on here.
The second most interesting about the One Touch Hero, though, is the price. At R5 999 it’s one of the keenest priced phablets around, and certainly the most attractive if you want a stylus. The most interesting thing, however, is the huge range of accessories which may – or may not – be included for that price when it launches in early 2014. (The representatives on Alcatel’s stand here say it will be R5 999 for the bundle, I can’t quite believe that.)
Firstly, there’s the cover. It attaches using an Apple-style magnetic clip, but has a thin e-ink screen embedded for displaying time and date and so on. Apparently, Alcatel is working on an app that will allow you to use it as a full blown ebook reader, so long as it’s attached to the phone, of course. Most people who carry a smartphone and a Kindle do so because they don’t want to drain their phone battery reading. This, essentially, wouldn’t.
The properly innovative piece however, is the companion device. Where Samsung has tackled the problem of having to grapple with an oversized phone by putting speakers and a mic into a smartwatch, Alcatel has designed a dummy handset to go with the Hero. It looks like a very thin candy bar phone of yore, but is simply a Bluetooth speaker kit in design. When connected, you can use it just like a traditional feature phone to call and text while you leave the more formal One Touch Hero in your bag.
I can’t quite work out whether this is complete overkill or absolute genius. And I’m leaning towards the latter. Phablets are big, ruin the line of your trousers if you try to stick them in a pocket and far too fragile to carry around if you’re doing the gardening, for example. A cheap, replaceable handset that does everything you need while you stash the expensive piece away somewhere safe until its needed really does make a lot of sense to me.
Then again, it has been a long day. Am I just easily impressed?
