The Alcatel Go Play was revealed at the IFA 2015 and is one of two devices in Alcatel’s “Go” range, the other being the Go Watch. The Go Play itself is marketed as a mid range phone with an incredibly affordable price and ton of interesting features which, after testing it for an extended period of time, may not make it an ideal phone for the power user but is probably one of the best devices to give to your errant kid as their first smartphone.
Design & Hardware
The Go Play has one of the most quirkiest designs on a smartphone I’ve ever seen and while I adored the look, others may not take well to it as I found out. Its dimensions are 143.3 x 73.3 x 9.2mm and weighs in at 151g making it quite light and not overly cumbersome to handle like a phablet. What pulls me to the Go Play is its colour scheme; the norm for nearly every single smartphone maker out there is to have a list of chic and pretentious-sounding colour schemes such as “rose gold” or “steel grey.” The Go Play on the other hand goes for a fun and adventurous colour scheme, mine being black and red, with the back of the phone covered in a black mesh overlaying the red cover. There are also 7 other colour schemes, something that already has most flagship smartphones beat out there.
There are two small slits on the bottom left of the non-removable back cover of the phone, marking the speaker ports, whilst the diminutive camera lens is near the top and in the middle with the LED flash sitting below it. At the top of the front of the phone sits the minuscule front facing camera with the Android navigational touch keys at the bottom, below the 5-inch screen. The volume rocker and power button are on the right side of the Go Play, towards the top with the micro-SIM and micro-SD compartments directly opposite them on the left side of the phone.
The headphone jack and the micro USB port are located on the top and bottom of the phone respectively and are covered by plastic covers, something I haven’t seen since I owned a Nokia 5800. And the reason for this is to ensure that no dust or water gets inside the phone, rendering it dust and water-resistant, giving it a rating of IP67– being able to be submerged in water at upto a metre in depth and for 30 minutes. But that’s not all the protection the Go Play offers, the plastic body also ensures that it’s shockproof, letting you drop it from a whopping height of 15 metres according to Alcatel; I’ll be honest I’ve dropped it surreptitiously many a time during my tenure with it and it still looks factory new.
Display
The 5” HD IPS, capacitive touchscreen display has a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels, bringing the overall PPI to around 294. A lack of an oleophobic coating means that it isn’t impervious to grimy fingerprints unfortunately. When it comes to brightness, the Go Play is lacking; you’ll have to squint a bit when viewing the screen during the day and at full brightness, next to my Honor 7 it looks utterly dull. The 720p display, whilst not packing the resolution of a standard 1080p display does perform well when it comes to clarity of images and video.
Camera
The Go Play has a 8 Megapixel which features Digital zoom x 4, and a 5 Megapixel front facing camera for your selfie needs. 8 megapixels isn’t a lot though it does the job well. Focus and white balance are spot on in the automatic mode but if you’re one for perfection, you can switch to manual mode, which lets you adjust the focus, ISO, shutter speed and white balance. The other modes available are HDR, panorama, scanner (for barcodes) and beauty mode (if you want to remove blemishes from your skin.) Video wise, the Go Play captures at 1080p 30-FPS.
Another great thing about the Go Play’s camera is that you can shoot underwater images!
Performance
The powerhouse behind the Go Play is the Qualcomm MSM8916 Snapdragon 410 Quad Core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A53 that’s supported by one GB of RAM. Graphics wise the Adreno 306 serves to ensure you get some gaming out of the Go Play, but don’t expect it to run anything heavy.
During my tenure with the Go Play I never experienced a significant amount of lag or stuttering, though opening memory intensive apps like Facebook and FB Messenger would take a few seconds. However once apps were open, switching between them is a seamless experience though lag does get noticeable the longer the apps are simultaneously open.
Sound wise the Go Play does a fantastic job, ramping up the volume doesn’t result in any distortion, and the effects of covering the rear speaker port by placing it down on a flat surface are marginal. If you want to amp the experience up you can opt to get the splashproof and sweatproof earphones available on the Go Play website.
A 2,500 mAh, non-removable battery powers the Go Play, one that Alcatel claims can produce over 8 hours of talk time (3G) and an astronomical 500 hours of standby time. I managed to have the Go Play last for about 16 hours with medium usage before needing to hunt for a wall socket to charge it.
Software
The Go Play runs Android 5.0.2 and has a variety of apps (i.e: bloatware) that comes along with it. While a variety of the stock apps I got were just bloatware, such as the 4 games that come pre installed along with some social media apps, which takes the available space down to around 800 MB. However one of the apps “View Me”is a fantastic find. It enables the user to record what appears on their screen and also has the option to record the viewer through the forward facing camera. As a result you can record a video of an event while simultaneously recording your reaction.
Swiping homescreens to the left will show the OneTouch Stream, a homescreen similar to Google Now, which showcases weather statistics along with news, featured apps and some wallpapers you can download.
Verdict
The durable build, aesthetics and sound quality makes the Alcatel Go Play ideal for a younger base of users and would make it the perfect gift as a first smartphone for your child who you don’t quite trust yet with something as fragile and expensive as an iPhone.
However this is still a medium end phone so don’t expect it to perform well under heavy usage especially with graphic intensive games. And while the aesthetics may appeal to younger generation, I can see that a more mature range of users would be turned off by something so audacious in looks.
It is being retailed for AED 980.
