Alcatel GO FLIP 4044 4G LTE (Unlocked for All Carriers) Flip Phone for Seniors Big Buttons Easy to Use - Black

Product Information

The phone works as a hotspot on T-Mobile but, oddly, not on AT&T. Don't expect major hotspot speeds: The Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 processor here only supports relatively slow Category 4 LTE, so you'll get 10-20Mbps LTE speeds rather than much higher. The speakerphone isn't great. The speaker itself is bottom-ported, so it faces away from you, and it isn't very loud. More importantly, speakerphone microphone transmissions on the Sprint network came through as disappointingly muddy. The Alcatel Go Flip 4 is a classic phone for people who do not use social media and just want a basic phone to do their daily tasks. This is the phone worth considering for someone who misses the old flip phone but still wants a slightly-smart device. You can play videos stored on your microSD card, but they look grainy on the small screen. Comparisons and Conclusions

Alcatel Go Flip 4 Review: A Modern Touch to The Classic Flip

The Go Flip's camera is simply bad. There's a 2-megapixel main camera, which records 320-by-258 video. Images look yellow or bluish, blurry or like the lens is coated in Vaseline. The video mode only gets up to a jerky 20 frames per second in good indoor light, and the screen image kept tearing when I recorded. The less said about the phone's single 2-megapixel camera, the better. Photos in even decent indoor light tend to be blurry and indistinct. Outdoors, everything looks slightly out of focus. Videos are washed-out 352-by-288 frames. There is also no front facing camera, so don't expect to do video calling here. A battery that can be removed is definitely an advantage. Should there be any damage to the battery, we can always find a replacement instead of throwing the phone away.

Alcatel INSIGHT™

The Go Flip runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 processor, like other modern feature phones. The T-Mobile version has LTE bands 2/4/12, and the Sprint version has 25/26/41. I didn't have any RF problems indoors or out, and T-Mobile users will see a significant coverage advantage with this phone over one that relies primarily on 1900MHz 2G. Both models support Wi-Fi calling, on 2.4GHz networks only, and both have GSM/UMTS for international roaming. (According to Sprint, its model only roams within North America because of Sprint business policies.) Alcatel also told me this phone will have—get this—50 percent better standby battery life than the previous model, which had 12 days of quoted standby time, but which many buyers said had more like three days after the fact. That's without increasing the device size. The 1,350mAh battery is still removable, too. There are millions of Americans who want a flip phone for simple calling, but who need access to the best possible coverage and may also want to use common over-the-top texting apps like Facebook and WhatsApp. The Go Flip 3 fits the bill: smart enough to make you part of modern society, but simple enough that you don't have to be part of modern society if you don't want to be. It's funny: The older Go Flip 2 also has a Snapdragon 210, but it doesn't perform nearly as well as the new model does. Alcatel said that KaiOS 2.5 is much more efficient than the KaiOS 1.0 on the older phone, and it really shows.

Alcatel Go Flip 4 | Unboxing and detailed walk through! Alcatel Go Flip 4 | Unboxing and detailed walk through!

However, Alcatel Go Flip 4 is a feature phone with some limitations. Thus, it doesn’t remind us anything about an Android phone or iPhone. The device is surprisingly able to play games specifically optimized for flip phones. It’s good to know that we can kill time by playing simple quizzes and trivia. The Go Flip is available on Sprint and T-Mobile . For both carriers, it's part of a push to shift customers from 2G, which most voice phones still use, to 4G LTE, so the carriers can retire the old 2G networks in the future. (For what it's worth, both Sprint and T-Mobile intend to keep 2G alive for at least two more years.) As of this writing, it's the only low-cost feature phone those carriers sell. Design and Call Quality Call quality is good. The phone supports HD calling (but not EVS, the second level of HD) and the earpiece is loud and clear. In a loud environment, the phone worked hard to cancel out noise, resulting in a few audio artifacts but generally comprehensible speech. The speakerphone is loud, and shows a little bit of clipping and distortion at top volume. Wi-Fi calling is the one real quality fail, but it often is; on a weak or cluttered 2.4GHz Wi-Fi signal, you're going to get dropouts. Google Assistant is good for more than just messages; hold down the button and ask it a question, and it will respond with Google answers. I wish it could be triggered from the action button on a Bluetooth headset, though—you actually have to hold down the center button on the phone's D-pad to make it work.We also thought that the phone didn’t have enough tools to make our lives easier. It isn’t smart enough, especially for the next generation of expressive users who constantly want more than just being connected to people. KaiOS, which is based on the same core that previously gave us Firefox OS, sits on the fence between a feature phone and a smartphone operating system. It's really rendering a lot of HTML, and the apps are primarily HTML5 containers that run offline. The OS has become popular in India thanks to the low-cost Jio Phone, a device that has brought tens of millions of people online for the first time. There's a Wi-Fi hotspot mode, as well as USB modem tethering. That said, the Snapdragon 210's Cat 4 modem is pretty slow, so you probably won't see speeds much above 10Mbps.

Alcatel GO FLIP™ 4 - Easy as you think, smarter than you

The onboard music player, oddly, wouldn't play music I had stored on an SD card—I had to transfer it into internal memory. Once I did that, though, it had excellent support for metadata and album art. The video player can play videos from the SD card, but they look small and grainy on the low-res screen. There's also an FM radio, which sounds very clear. Google Assistant is good for more than just messages; hold down the button and ask it a question, and it will respond with Google answers. I wish it could be triggered from the action button on a Bluetooth headset, though —you actually have to hold down the center button on the phone's D-pad to make it work.Battery life is fine. It isn't eternal, but I got 7 hours, 48 minutes of talk time and at least three days of standby on the 1,350mAh battery. That's much better than previous Alcatel flips and shoule be enough for most people. I really wanted to like the Go Flip because KaiOS has so much potential. An easily extensible, HTML5-based feature phone OS could bridge some of the gaps between smart and feature phones, keeping up with new talk and messaging services as they arise. It's a great idea. Voice dialing is missing. At least you can define ringtones by caller, and use your own songs as ringtones if you like.