Alcatel OneTouch Pop 7 Review

Introduction

The Alcatel OneTouch Pop 7 is a budget-oriented, 7-inch slate that aims to bring decent performance and extended connectivity at an accessible price. The tab is supposed to be the thinnest and lightest of its kind, and also packs a dual-core CPU, 1GB RAM, and a pair of cameras. It also has a 3G/HSDPA+ modem, which is a good sales point for a tablet in the $150-$180 price range. But does the rest of the package add up to an attractive offer? Let's find out.

In the box:

• USB Cable
• Wall Charger
• User Manual

Design

It's an easy exercise in pedestrian looks.

Alcatel claims that the OneTouch Pop 7 is the thinnest, lightest entry-level 7-inch tablet out there. More precisely, the tab measures 0.35 inches (8.9 mm) thin and 0.63 lbs (285 grams) in weight. Although this is a respectable achievement, the Nexus 7 (2013) is slightly thinner (0.34 inches, 8.65mm), while the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 7.0 will weigh in at just 0.60 lbs (275 grams).

In terms of design, the tablet doesn't stand out with elegance, or anything special, really. It's the functional, anonymous result of an easy exercise in pedestrian looks. The all-plastic build complements it entirely, and while there is nothing to outright love about it, there is nothing to frown at, either. This is a solid little tablet with a good weight to it, that's comfortable to hold with both one and two hands. You will hear it squeak a little, and the back panel and side bezel give in a little when pressed on, but these are typical, innocent budget device shenanigans.

When the tablet's plain design gets boring eventually, you can vary it a bit with removable plastic back panels in cheerful pastel colors (available separately). Changing between them is an absolute breeze, and they fit the tablet nice and snug. However, the panels add a tiny bit of weight, and completely cover up the microSD and SIM-card slots. The latter might be an advantage, or a small inconvenience, depending on whether you appreciate the additional protection of the slots, or depend on easy access to them. Either way, the slots are protected by a flap that's very easy to handle.

Meanwhile, Alcatel's optional magnetic cover will serve you just fine, although it gave off a remarkably offending scent of stale plastic when we took it out of its packaging. Luckily, it wore off quickly.

Display

One of the worst displays we have seen recently!

Display-wise, the OneTouch Pop 7 doesn't have much to show off. The 7-inch TFT panel has a resolution of 1024x600 pixels with pixel density coming in at 170ppi. This means that small objects – like icons – do not look sharp, but blurry, and fine text (e.g. in the browser, when zoomed out) cannot be read comfortably, so you have to zoom in. Even 1080p videos look slightly pixelated from normal viewing distance.
Image quality is very poor for a few reasons. The display has exceptionally cold color temperature at 16334 Kelvins (6500 K is the perfect temperature, while displays with 8000K are considered blueish) which means that the white colors has a solid blue tint. But it's not only this - colors such as cyan and magenta, for example, also are completely off.

The viewing angles are also rather quirky. When the tab is held in portrait mode, the picture quickly collapses when the tablet is skewed to the right, losing contrast and making text impossible to read.

Maximum brightness is decent, at 363 nits, so the display should be usable outdoors during the day, right? Well, the very reflexive glass make this almost impossible. It is so bad, that you may find it hard reading it even in a room during the day. What's more, it is a fingerprint magnet, and you will often notice this. There is also no light sensor to speak of, so automatic brightness adjustment is out of the question.

It's not sensible to expect the vividness of an upper-range display out of a cheap tablet. Still, this is one of the worst displays we have seen recently.

Interface and Functionality

Slightly modified version of Jelly Bean is old news now.

The Alcatel OneTouch Pop 7 runs Android 4.2.2 out of the box, which is a version more than an year old at this point. The MediaTek chipset is to blame here – the Taiwanese silicon slinger is yet to make its chips support recent Android builds. The tablet's UI is notably light on modifications - it's pretty much stock Android with a blue tint thrown in the menus, wallpapers and widgets. Additionally, most of the icons have received a makeover – the style is flat, not spectacular, but clear and unambiguous. Like it or not, the company has opted for on-screen software navigation buttons to control the tablet
. We believe hardware buttons would have served better, considering the device's big bottom bezel.

Alcatel has abstained from filling the tablet's limited storage with too much “bloatware” apps. All we get are simple Browser (a fork of Firefox), E-Mail, and File Manager apps; OneTouch Center – an app for PC syncing; OneTouch Live – a rather bare list of apps recommended by Alcatel, such as Opera and LinkedIn; OneTouch Support – a convenient app for directly calling Alcatel's support lines worldwide; People, which is an address book modeled after Google's stock Contacts app; and the SyncML and Tethering apps.

Processor and memory

Pop 7 definitely doesn't feel underpowered, but graphics-intensive games are out of its reach.

The Alcatel OneTouch Pop 7 runs on a humble MediaTek MT8312 chipset with two Cortex-A7 cores clocked at 1.3GHz, a tried and true Mali-400 GPU, and 1GB RAM. Storage-wise, there are 4GB of memory, out of which 2GB are available for using. This is the norm with most 4GB tablets, and if you need more storage, it can be expanded with a microSD card (up to 32GB).

Gaming-wise, the slate's hardware will absolutely let you play most popular casual titles, including those with moderately intricate visuals in the vein of Temple Run 2. Gameloft and similar publishers' graphics-intensive titles, on the other hand, will be out of your reach, although the impressive Dead Trigger 2 ran without a hitch.

As a whole, this is an adequate configuration for a budget 7-inch tablet, and for the purposes of casual usage, it actually performs better than expected. Alcatel's light-weight interface doesn't strain the system at all, and so far, the tablet hasn't crashed or otherwise exercised our patience. The tablet definitely doesn't feel underpowered.

Internet and connectivity

Not an underperformer, but not an overachiever either.

The Alcatel OneTouch Pop 7 we have for review is a 3G-enabled version, supporting fast HSDPA+ 21.1 Mbit/s, HSUPA 5.76 Mbit/s networks. The extended connectivity is one of the tablet's strongest sides, which you will rarely find in budget models – especially from “name” vendors.

Browsing performance is important for a tablet – it's one of its most common usages, after all. The Pop 7 works fine for this purpose, with sites rendering correctly and functions such as zooming in and out happening quickly. However, website loading became increasingly problematic beyond the 10th opened tab. Although the browser remained operational, websites either loaded partially, or got completely stuck. The tablet isn't capable of heavy-duty browsing and multitasking, but it doesn't underperform. In fact, it does well, given how modest its MediaTek dual-core processor is.

To gain further perspective on the Alcatel Pop Touch 7's browsing performance, we put the stock browser through SunSpider and Browsermark. The OneTouch Pop 7 took both like a champ, and while the scores of 1457.6ms and 2141 points, respectively, are far from being Olympic-like, they show that this little tablet is able to keep up with non-extreme usage.

Camera

Well, at least it takes photos and videos.

We don't have anything nice to say about the Alcatel Pop Touch 7's rear camera, except that it has one. It is a 2-megapixel snapper with no auto-focus or flash – shortcomings that should tell enough about the photo and video quality. Well, at least the camera is there and takes photos and videos. There's also a 0.3MP front-facing camera that has pretty poor quality, but it will suffice for video chatting – even if you don't look your very best through it.

Multimedia

A lackluster viewing experience garnished with passable sound.

In terms of multimedia support, the OneTouch Pop 7 plays the most popular video and audio formats out of the box. Music sounds passable through the tablet's lone speaker – the sound isn't overly thin, or distorted. It's pretty much a typical small speaker affair. As for video, 1080p clips encoded in DivX (.avi), H.264 (.mp4), MPEG-4(.mp4), and Xvid (.avi) run flawlessly, although the display's poor colors and viewing angles don't make for an immersive viewing experience.

Battery life

Six hours of normal usage isn't a full shift, but is close enough.

Alcatel's tablet lasted for six hours and four minutes in our battery test. This is a good result for the Pop 7's 3240mAh battery, considering 7-inch slates in this class are accustomed to 3500mAh batteries and beyond. Perhaps the decent battery life can be owed to the tablet's lightweight software and frugal processor.

Conclusion

We have to start this wrap-up with our opinion about the display of the Alcatel OneTouch Pop 7 – it is really of very poor quality, with low resolution, awful colors, and bad reflexive glass that makes it hard to read when the sun is shining. It really is the deal breaker. Otherwise, the Pop 7 is a decent budget tablet that has nice build, reasonable specs, and doesn't feel underpowered or unpleasant to use. Most importantly, it's 3G-connected. So, if you are looking for an affordable, 3G-connected slate to use on the go, there are not many other options. Its bigger brother, the Pop 8, has an excellent display in comparison, but is also much pricier at about $275 for the HSPA-enabled version.

However, if you don't really need the 3G-connectivity that much, you better scratch the Pop 7 off your list, because the price range below $200 offers formidable Wi-Fi-only tablets. For example, the Dell Venue 7 and 8 dance circles around the Pop 7 with their HD displays, Intel CPUs and 2GB of RAM. And if you are willing to wait until May, Lenovo recently announced an affordable trio of Wi-Fi-only and 3G tablets with 720p displays and quad-core processors that might be worth considering – we still don't know the 3G-connected variants' prices, nor how they perform. And, there's always the Amazon Kindle Fire HD – it's hard to miss the retailer's devices these days.