Two of Alcatel’s five smartphones, revealed at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona last month, will arrive in United States ‘in the coming months’, the company announced on Friday.
One is Alcatel 1X and the other Alcatel 3V.
Alcatel 1X is a very low-end device with a 5.3-inch display. It is one of the first phones to run Android Go, a slimmed down version of the OS optimized for low-end smartphone devices.
The phone is powered by a quad-core MediaTeck chipset and has a 1GB of RAM 16GB of storage.
The company says that the device will cost ‘less than $100 which means we can expect a retail price of $99.99.
3V, on the other hand, has a 6-inch FHD+ display, 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB or 32 GB of storage. it also runs a quad-core MediaTek CPU (though a bit bigger than the 1X’s).
The US version of the phone also features a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor, which the international version lacks.
The company says that the device will cost ‘less than $100 which means we can expect a retail price of $99.99.
The phone also features a dual camera system (a main 12MP which is paired with a wide-angle 2MP), which the company has integrated in the US version of a device for the first time.
The retail price of the device is expected to be between $170 and $199 in US.
Alcatel did not reveal a release date for both devices in US but said they will arrive in “the coming months.”
Google had released the Oreo version of Android Go for low-end smartphones with 512 MB to 1GB of RAM in December last year.
The company has also released Go version of some of its apps, including Google Search, Assistant, Chrome, Maps, Gmail and YouTube, which take up less space on the phone and consume less processing power and data.
Besides Alcatel, HMD Global had also launched an Android Go phone – Nokia 1 – at MWC.
Like 1X, Nokia 1 is also a very low-end device with 4.5-inch IPS display, 1GB of RAM, MediaTek quad-core processor, and 8 GB of storage.
HMD has announced that the phone will go on sale in Australia, Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, India and Middle East from April this year but there is no official announcement about its arrival in the US.
