Style and handling

Brash and colourful, the OT-255 is good fun and really light – in fact it’s so tiny you may forget you have it in your pocket

User friendliness

The OT-255 is easy to use, partly because it lacks the sophistication to be hard to handle

Feature set

There’s not much in the way of features but what do you expect at this price?

Performance

The OT-255 is a decent performer despite the fact that it’s not hugely speedy and the web browsing experience is frustrating

Battery power

You’ll get a day or two out of a fully charged battery

When it comes to phones, you get affordable handsets and then you have the downright cheap. Alcatel has a reputation for producing nifty, very well-priced phones, but even it has done wonders by offering the OT-255, a handset with a QWERTY keyboard that you can buy on a pay-as-you-go tariff for around 10 pounds. Surely you’re not going to get much for that kind of money?

Well, we were surprised. Sure, there are no fancy functions. You’ll get no smartphone-like offerings such as Wi-Fi, GPS and a high-res snapper (in fact there’s no camera at all), nor will you get the sort of functions you’ll find on a medium-range handset. That means you’ll have no 3G, 3.5mm headphone jack or even any storage expansion options.

So, you won’t choose the OT-255 as your everyday handset, but it might be useful for a backup to take to a pub or club, or for a child to use. And if you have a pricey smartphone, putting the SIM in the OT-255 will make it less of an attraction for thieves.

Screen

And to be fair, for a tenner, the handset does quite a lot. The colour display measures 1.8 inches and is friendly to the eyes. It’s not high-res of course, and it’s rather small for viewing anything in detail. But the phone itself is tiny and ridiculously lightweight – a nice change from the weighty four-inch screen smartphones – so it will be easily popped in a small handbag or pocket.

Alcatel has managed to make its budget phone look fun and colourful, rather than tacky and cheap. We were impressed that the soft keys beneath the display matched the one-screen labels exactly – which doesn’t always happen. Mind you, the direction pad needs to be handled carefully for accurate operation. We actually found it easier to use our thumbnail to select items, as using the thumb tended to result in us heading in all kinds of directions,

User-friendliness

However, the OT-255 is so simple to use. The menu comprises a lengthy list of icons, which is straightforward but does make for rather laborious operation – it’s not fast, but you won’t get lost in a maze of menus. And if you’re used to the raft of separate icons on a smartphone, you’ll find the Alcatel system quick and easy to work out. The weather program is located next to the alarm clock, then you’ll see notes, Fake Call and so on. It is also possible to rearrange the shortcuts as you wish. By the way, in case you didn’t know, Fake Call is a nifty extra that lets you secretly get your phone to ring a minute after you do a long press on the key. On the screen will pop up caller details, so that you can bring a long, tedious conversation or meeting to a halt if you need to.

The QWERTY keyboard

Then of course there’s that keyboard, which can be used for note taking, emailing and texting. While BlackBerry won’t be too threatened by it, it’s actually very usable. It’s possible to type speedily after a bit of use. For a tenner, don’t expect to have the benefit of text prediction or error correction. Or in fact, for the phone to be clever enough to introduce a capital letter after a full stop. However, it does have the full stop and @ symbols on the lower case keys – which makes it quicker when entering email addresses – that’s something even BlackBerry hasn’t managed yet.

The web browsing experience is not that great – the connection is sluggish and jerky and the display is too small to view easily.

The verdict

That’s pretty much all that’s on offer, apart from a couple of really basic games, FM Radio and a Tasks memo facility. And of course you can make calls. When it comes to it, it’s not going to be the kind of phone you’ll swap your iPhone for, but as a spare handset that you don’t need to worry about, you couldn’t hope for more.