The Alcatel 300 series (mine is 302) is smaller, thinner, shorter, than its predecessor - in the good looks dept it’s much more elegant too. Despite being smaller, standby times are better at 165 hours (quoted figures) with talktime around 4.5 hours.
The phone is absolutely packed with features. Of course it has WAP, browser version 1.1, I personally find it quite easy to connect - I’ve heard horrendous connection problems with other people’s WAP phones on various other networks, but amazingly I don’t find a problem as the phone was preconfigured. But I must confess I don’t WAP much as it seems a severe anti-climax after viewing web pages on a PC. Sort of the same difference as looking at a glossy colourful picture rich Magazine and then sticking your nose into the column classified ad section of your local newspaper...yukkkk! AND you pay per minute for viewing black and white text on a matchbox sized screen...NO thanks, I’ll stick to PC surfing which is ’free’ and better enabled. The scrolling on the phone is handled by a ball shaped rocker button, push up to scroll up, down to scroll down, and press to OK, pretty straight forward.
Coming back to the features, it sports vibration alert (but is perhaps a bit weak) 3 games, an alarm and appointment reminder, analogue style clock, built in speaker phone function, (which I use all the time to prevent frying my brains) ascending ringer tone, calculator, predictive SMS, and believe it or not a currency convertor (handy for those USD to Rupee conversions, controls for adjusting LCD contrast, and intensity of the backlight, and one programmable melody for the ringer.
As with some motorola phones it unifies ’answer call’ and ’hang up’ with one button - press for line, press again to finish call.
The front panel can be changed and swoped which tends to be the fashion these days, the phone I acquired came with a high tech silver finish and is satisfactory for me, otherwise it’s paying extra for buying a new colour interchangable panel. If you like you can have a different colour for each day of the week!
Call clarity is pretty good, and I suspect now all phones are pretty much the same with the improvement in technology.
It comes with a unique visually and physically integrated belt clip which attaches itself directly to the phone, and a desktop charger stand, which gives the phone a bit more presence when it is charging (about 3 hours - but 12 hours on first charge). As the phone is standing vertically, you can see the caller display if there are any incoming calls, rather like a home cordless DECT phone.
My criticisms of the phone is the LCD is perhaps a shade too dark, making the display slighly more difficult to read in low light situations, (so you have to activate the backlight). The characters on the LCD are also a tad on the small side.
But overall a very small WAP phone with heaps of features at a reasonable price.