Exclusive: Mobile World Congress doesn’t take place until the end of the month, but already, we’ve got the details on one handset expected to appear at the show. The Alcatel OT-915 is the French company’s next Android effort, packing a largely unskinned Android 2.3 and a QWERTY keyboard – and we’ve confirmed that it’s coming to the UK.
Despite Android’s huge success, we’ve not seen a break out hit with a portrait QWERTY keyboard so far. We’ve seen vague efforts from HTC, Samsung and Motorola, but none have been received well, or managed to dislodge the BlackBerry as tween messaging mobile du jour.
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Alcatel is hoping to change that with the 11.9mm thick Alcatel OT-915, which takes the candybar form factor of a BlackBerry or a Palm Pixi, and squeezes in a 240×320 2.8-inch touchscreen. Inside, it’s packing Wi-Fi, a five megapixel camera and – unusually – an FM radio.
Alcatel has not revealed a launch date or price yet, but has confirmed to Electricpig that it will go on sale in the UK this year. Retail partners and pricing also remain elusive: however, the company’s last two Android phones, the OT-980 and OT-990, were sold by Carphone Warehouse and O2 respectively for under £100, so we’d expect this to dip into the double figures likewise.
We recently revealed that the British made, QWERTY toting INQ Cloud Q had been cancelled: anyone with their eye on that might well find solace in this little critter.
