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

Product Information

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. But when we attached a Plantronics Voyager Focus UC headset, the Go Flip's old Bluetooth 3.0 connection struggled. Calls in the headset sounded thready, and my voice was highly compressed, at one point so squashed that an IVR had trouble telling what I was saying.

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

There's been a crisis in flip phones over the past few years. US carriers are reducing their 2G and 3G networks and focusing on 4G calling, which many older and less expensive phones don't support. Simple phones that support 4G calling have been hard to find.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. As a feature phone, Alcatel Go Flip 4 has a 2MP rear camera. Although we could not see the point, it offers a self-timer option like the smartphone since we won’t likely mount the device to a tripod. 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. For those who have never used a flip phone, it may take some time to get used to it. However, it won’t take long to navigate for users familiar with a flip device. Another benefit is that when we accidentally drop our phone in the water, we can dry it off by opening the battery cover so it won’t affect other components inside the phone.

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

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. The Alcatel Go Flip 4 has 2.8 inches display with QVGA quality. We don’t expect a high-definition display, but given its tiny screen, we felt it’s bright and clear enough for a traditional phone with 320 x 240 pixels resolution. The KaiOS interface may be all HTML5, but it looks just like other old-school feature phones: a grid of big icons with commands attached to Left and Right buttons below the screen. The colors are bold, the fonts are attractive, and the icons are clear, but once again it's all quite sluggish. It's all of the overhead of HTML5 with none of the apparent flexibility or extensibility, at least on this phone. Voice dialing is missing. At least you can define ringtones by caller, and use your own songs as ringtones if you like. 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. You don't have permission to access "http://www.argos.co.uk/browse/technology/mobile-phones-and-accessories/sim-free-phones/c:30147/brands:alcatel/" on this server. Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions. See how we test.

Alcatel Go Flip 3 Review | PCMag Alcatel Go Flip 3 Review | PCMag

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 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. The good news is that we can still zoom in and zoom out the snapshots. We can also record a video using the phone. Another interesting feature is the option to choose a high or low-quality image for the shots. 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.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.

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

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. TCL Communication claimed that their Go Flip 4 battery can last up to 18 days standby or 12 hours talk time. We believe that the phone battery lasts that long because we might only use it for basic activities and nothing heavy. Is the Alcatel Go Flip 4 a good phone?I'm that 5G guy. I've actually been here for every "G." I've reviewed well over a thousand products during 18 years working full-time at PCMag.com, including every generation of the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S. I also write a weekly newsletter, Fully Mobilized, where I obsess about phones and networks.