Manufacturers are squeezing in some last minute announcements before IFA 2014 kicks off in Berlin. The flood of new toys is coming in less than 24 hours. Before we get there, Alcatel just announced their new OneTouch Flash phablet at an event in Thailand. It’s a large screen smartphone with a 13-megapixel camera and a big battery, but other than that the specs are mid-range. Oh, and there’s no LTE support because this is Thailand we’re talking about.
The OneTouch Flash has a 5.5-inch display with a 720p screen resolution. The rear camera is 13-megapixels, while the front facing camera is 5-megapixels. It’s running on a MediaTek chipset, the MT6592M. That chip has a 1.4 GHz octa-core Cortex A7 CPU in it. We’re looking at 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage, a microSD card for expandable storage, a huge 3200 mAh battery, and dual-SIM slots. Dual-SIM capability is another one of those things that happens in Asia, but not so much in the US.
The OneTouch Flash runs on Android 4.4.2 KitKat. The price of the device was not announced at the Alcatel event in Thailand, but it will probably be priced like most of the mid-range Asian devices we see coming out. Xiaomi, Huawei, even Samsung are competing for the mid-range space because the devices are cheap to make and consumers like spending a little less money.
Like I mentioned, the Flash doesn’t have LTE support, running only on 900 and 2100 MHz 3G bands. We won’t see Alcatel bringing the Flash to the western world, which is probably why they announced it before IFA. The company did put together a video for the device, one in which they take some not-so-subtle stabs at Samsung and Xiaomi. The Flash is pitted against a device called the “Note” and both of those rival companies have smartphones with that name. The “Note” in the video even looks like the Redmi Note. Fun!