Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.
If there is one thing smartphones are made for it's the internet – and, in particular, the mobile web. But the Alcatel OT-980 starts off with a few negative points thanks to the small screen and low pixel count.
The problem is that you really can't get a lot on screen at any one time with these kinds of dimensions at your disposal. Take the TechRadar home page, for example. You can get a good overview of it, but it's impossible to read much text at all.
So, you have to zoom in, which you can do with a double tap on the part of the screen you want to get a closer look at (and it is another double tap to zoom back out again), or by a single tap to get a zoom tool that lets you go even further into a page.
The good news is that the zooming is quite fast and smooth, scrolling is efficient too, and text reflows properly so that there's no need to do a lot of that scrabbling about to read text.
We actually found web browsing was a bit more of a rewarding experience than we'd expected it to be because of these features, so well done to Alcatel on that. Have a biscuit.
What about video via the web? Well, this being Android 2.1, it isn't worth trying to do stuff like watch video from the BBC website. You'll just get the old "You don't have the correct version of Flash" message. You can download YouTube videos, though, so video is not a complete no-go area.
If you want more online stuff then one of the many pre-installed apps is A Online Radio (that's Android Online Radio to you). This is a nifty streaming radio service that gives you access to oodles and oodles of stations.
We used this over Wi-Fi heavily during the course of writing this review, to listen to some of our favourite internet-only music from around the world.
It helps that the speaker on the Alcatel OT-980 isn't too bad, and we could certainly see ourselves using it for a bit of catch up on this and that. But to be fair, A Online Radio is a free download to any Android handset, so it isn't the kind of plus point to make the Alcatel OT-980 outstanding.
