Alcatel seems to be making a pretty bold push lately with well-specced and decently looking Android smartphones, as an attempt to make a comeback in the smartphone market. They have some great dual-SIM Cortex A7-based smartphones looking to come out for the mid-end to high-end part of the market.
The two smartphones are the Scribe X and Scribe HD-LTE. The first one is a 5″ 1080p smartphone, with a quad core 1.4 Ghz Cortex A7 processor, that’s not a very high-end chip for 2013, but it should get the job done. It seems Alcatal is shooting more towards efficiency and cost-cutting to make the devices cheaper, rather than try to beat the upcoming Galaxy S4 in performance.
The Scribe X also comes with an HD front-facing camera, and a 12 MP back camera. The next phone, the Scribe HD-LTE, has “only” an HD 720p screen, a slightly weaker CPU (probably dual core 1.2 Ghz), and of course is LTE-enabled. The OS will Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Alcatel is being very economical with tech specs here, so we don’t know much more. But it seems obvious they haven’t done this much before (sending press releases about smartphones to tech sites).
So Alcatel seems pretty new at this, but I think it’s great we’re getting more competition to drive prices of smartphones down, and force their competitors to compete even more on quality and better specs and new innovations. And I believe a big enablers here – I mean it’s making even no-name companies, or companies who you’d think you’d never see in the phone market again, rise up against the top competitors with powerful devices that look good and benefit from the same large Android app ecosystem.
Imagine how much harder it would be for these companies to start over with their new OS and try to compete against the Galaxy S3’s and iPhones of the world. As long as the build quality and design is good enough, they can be great alternatives for people who are more price conscious, and don’t care as much about the brand name. And I think Alcatel can be one of those companies to at least provide that sort of alternative to smartphone customers.
[Via Engadget]