The Alcatel OneTouch Pop 7 entry-level 3G tablet first made its debut at CES earlier this year and made it on to Canada’s Bell network in July – now it is landing on Virgin Mobile for only $179.99 off contract. The Pop 7 is not available online, but sold only in certain Virgin Mobile retail outlets – not sure why they made that marketing decision as no reason was cited.
The Alcatel OneTouch Pop 7 is a 7-inch tablet with a TFT touchscreen with a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels that gives you about 170 Pixels-Per-Inch (PPI). A MediaTek MT8312 dual-core Cortex-A7 processor clocked at 1.3GHz and a Mali-400 GPU power the Pop 7 tablet. It has 1GB of RAM and 4GB of Internal Storage, although there is a microSD card slot to add an additional 32GB of storage. It does come with a 2MP main camera (1600 x 1200 pixels) and it will shoot 720p video. It even has a VGA front-facing camera (FFC) for a rather poor video chatting experience – 3G and VGA – but it would suffice for a selfie destined for a social media posting. It has the usual Wi-Fi 802.11 g/b/n and Bluetooth 4.0, 3.5mm jack, a loudspeaker and comes with a microUSB 2.0 port. The power comes from a 3,240mAh battery, which they claim will give you up to 70 hours using 3G. Out-of-the-box it has Android 4.2 Jelly bean. It measures 192 x 113 x 8.9mm and weighs in at 285 grams.
Alcatel One Touch is slowly, but surely expanding their devices in Canada – their Idol 2 S smartphone found its way on Bell, while the Idol X+ smartphone and Pop 9 tablet showed up on TELUS. The OneTouch Pop 7 may have a limited audience with only 3G, but at $180, it is hard to beat. Alcatel OneTouch makes some decent devices – well-built and reasonably in price. None of their devices will ever be accused of being high-end, but that is not the market they are going after. Please hit us up on our Google+ Page and let us know if the OneTouch Pop 7 on Virgin Mobile is something that you would be interest in purchasing. It is a nicely price 7-inch tablet for possibly a student…as always, we would love to hear from you.