Alcatel Go Flip - Review 2022

The Alcatel Go Flip ($75 at T-Mobile; $145 at Sprint) could be the future of flip phones. It runs KaiOS, a new operating system that could easily bridge generations by bringing messaging apps common among younger people (similar Whatsapp) to their flip-phone-loving older relatives. Right now, though, it's only a run-of-the-manufactory voice phone.

The Go Flip is available on Dart and T-Mobile. For both carriers, it's part of a push to shift customers from 2G, which most voice phones notwithstanding use, to 4G LTE, and then 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 to the lowest degree two more years.) As of this writing, information technology's the only low-cost feature phone those carriers sell.

Design and Call Quality

The Go Flip is a slightly squashed-looking flip phone in shiny black plastic, with a 1.44-inch color display on the front. Flip it open up, and there'due south a slightly raised chiclet-style keyboard and a dim, 320-by-240, ii.eight-inch LCD. The keys are big, nicely separated, and take a lilliputian bit of give to them. On the side, you'll detect book rockers, a defended camera button, and a headphone jack.

Call quality is skilful equally long as you stick to the traditional holding-it-to-your-head mode. The earpiece is powerfully loud, if a piffling harsh. Voices transmitted through the mouthpiece sound super-shine, with good dissonance cancellation.

Only when nosotros attached a Plantronics Voyager Focus UC headset, the Become Flip'due south old Bluetooth 3.0 connection struggled. Calls in the headset sounded thready, and my vocalisation was highly compressed, at one bespeak and then squashed that an IVR had problem telling what I was saying.

The speakerphone isn't slap-up. 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 Dart network came through equally disappointingly dirty.

Voice dialing is missing. At to the lowest degree yous tin define ringtones by caller, and use your own songs as ringtones if y'all like.

The Go Flip runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 processor, like other modernistic characteristic phones. The T-Mobile version has LTE bands 2/four/12, and the Sprint version has 25/26/41. I didn't take any RF problems indoors or out, and T-Mobile users will see a meaning coverage advantage with this phone over ane that relies primarily on 1900MHz 2G. Both models back up Wi-Fi calling, on ii.4GHz networks but, and both take GSM/UMTS for international roaming. (Co-ordinate to Dart, its model only roams inside North America considering of Sprint business policies.)

There's a Wi-Fi hotspot manner, too every bit 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.

Battery life was skillful: We got 7 hours, 32 minutes of talk fourth dimension.

Order From KaiOS

As all of the major wireless carriers switch to LTE, voice phones now need to support vocalisation-over-LTE, which older RTOS operating systems can't do. Ii competing OS approaches have grown upward for the next generation of vocalisation phones. LG, Kyocera, and others accept gone with a severely crippled version of Android, with no apps and stock-still functions. Nosotros've seen that approach, on and off, since the Motorola i886 in 2022. Back in 2022, I looked at whether Android was the future of feature phones.

Android-powered feature phones tend to accept clean, efficient interfaces. But because each one is its own custom remix, they lack an opportunity for tertiary-party apps and don't offer piece of cake means to add additional messaging services, like Skype, Whatsapp, or Facebook Messenger, which families may want to use to stay in touch.

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KaiOS has more than potential. Originally developed by a company called Acadine equally a spinoff of the Mozilla Boot to Gecko cadre, it's now run by a company called Kai that has close ties to TCL, Alcatel's parent company. KaiOS is based on HTML5, which makes information technology like shooting fish in a barrel to develop for. On Kai's site, the OS maker shows an app shop with mapping, news apps, social apps, games, and a swell-looking email client. The KaiOS-based Jio Telephone, in India, has Facebook and mobile payment apps.

Unfortunately, none of that potential is realized on the Become Flip. Moving between icons is slower than on Android-based flips like the LG Exalt LTE. The browser, which should be awesome—it's Firefox!—doesn't support location, so yous can't use maps, and information technology crashed when I tried to load heavy pages.

The KaiOS interface may be all HTML5, but it looks only like other one-time-school feature phones: a grid of big icons with commands attached to Left and Right buttons beneath the screen. The colors are assuming, the fonts are attractive, and the icons are clear, but once again it'south all quite sluggish. It's all of the overhead of HTML5 with none of the apparent flexibility or extensibility, at least on this phone.

There's a tiny glimpse of the power of KaiOS in the calendar and contact syncing systems. Y'all can import contacts from Gmail and Outlook, and they import properly, with multiple phone numbers, pictures, and everything. The calendar will besides sync with Gmail and G Suite, and evidence events.

Otherwise, beyond the typical messaging functions, you lot have e-mail and computer apps, but no flashlight, magnifying glass, or games. Alcatel could and should push a organization update to the Become Flip lineup to enable an app store and more capable apps. At the very least, unproblematic downloadable apps similar a currency estimator, tip calculator, and Snake or BrickBreaker game could make the Get Flip a lot more compelling.

Finicky Features

The Become Flip comes with 1GB of costless storage, and you can also tuck a microSD card upwards to 32GB in there. I found the microSD slot to be a niggling sticky, and I had problem getting the card out. The telephone's onboard music role player will play MP3, AAC, OGG, and M4A files, just not FLAC; it also supports M3U playlists. You can play music with the flip closed using wired or Bluetooth headphones, but oddly, it won't show you the song proper noun on the exterior screen. The FM radio is a footling bit of an afterthought. You tin favorite stations, but it doesn't have automobile-scanning or RDS station and song names.

The Go Flip'due south photographic camera is only bad. At that place's a 2-megapixel main photographic camera, which records 320-by-258 video. Images await yellowish or blueish, blurry or like the lens is coated in Vaseline. The video manner only gets up to a jerky 20 frames per second in proficient indoor calorie-free, and the screen paradigm kept tearing when I recorded.

You can play videos stored on your microSD carte du jour, simply they look grainy on the small screen.

Comparisons and Conclusions

I really wanted to like the Get Flip because KaiOS has so much potential. An easily extensible, HTML5-based characteristic phone OS could bridge some of the gaps between smart and characteristic phones, keeping up with new talk and messaging services as they arise. It's a great thought.

But the Go Flip doesn't realize the promise of KaiOS—information technology's but a kind of slow, fixed-part characteristic phone that doesn't work all that well. Sprint and T-Mobile don't offer whatsoever other low-cost feature phones, though, which sort of puts you lot in a bind. Dart's Kyocera DuraXTP works much ameliorate, merely information technology's likewise $270. Ouch.

Using unlocked vox phones on T-Mobile generally means relying on the carrier's 2G network, which doesn't have anywhere near the coverage of its LTE network nowadays. If you're OK with that and you want a pure, unproblematic voice phone, look at the Snapfon ezTWO 3G. Otherwise, the superior coverage offered by the Go Flip's LTE is worth choosing it over unlocked flip and candybar-manner alternatives that lack LTE and Wi-Fi calling.