Alcatel – as a smartphone brand – is enjoying a resurgence of sorts, up to being the fifth largest smartphone manufacturer in the US market from being 13th in 2014. It’s still not beating the aggressive Chinese manufacturers like Huawei and ZTE, but it’s somewhere around there. It is set to launch another high end smartphone for its OneTouch Idol line of phones, and this upcoming phone has a bit of a surprise for you – so don’t throw away the box.
The upcoming Alcatel OneTouch Idol 4 and Idol 4S (yes, they’re taking a new naming convention) will be the next flagship phones for Alcatel, with the Idol 4 sporting 5.2-inch display and the Idol 4S having a premium 5.5-inch QuadHD AMOLED display. The latter will be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 chipset, supported by 3GB RAM and 16GB internal storage.
But perhaps the most novel thing about the Idol 4S is in the packaging, which is a plastic box that doubles as a Google Cardboard-compliant VR viewer. At the reported pricing of lower than USD$400, this is a clever marketing ploy which should be noticed by VR enthusiasts and as a way of bringing the non-enthusiasts into the VR fold.
The Idol 4 is a step down in quality, the display is IPS LCD, and the processor is a Snapdragon 617. The smaller phone will retail at around USD$250. Let’s see if this marketing ploy will grab a bigger piece of the pie for Alcatel.
VIA: Venture Beat
