The Alcatel 2000 feature phone is very basic and aimed at anyone who isn’t tech-savvy but needs a phone primarily to make calls and send text messages. It's characterised by large buttons with raised numbers, so even vision-impaired users can dial numbers by touch. 

Build

Everything about this phone is basic and minimal. It comes with a small dock which connects to the charger, ideal for placing on a night stand. It eliminates the need for fiddling around and trying to plug the charger in the right port, which doesn’t plug directly into the phone anyway, hence the dock. It has a 3.5mm audio jack on the top, volume keys to the left, a built-in flashlight power button to the right, and lock function below that.

The phone takes a memory card of up to 16GB, through microSD. The phone has built-in noise cancellation, hands-free, flight mode, voice recorder, calculator, alarm clock, and supports SMS and MMS. It also supports group SMS. The phone’s on-board directory can store up to 200 phone numbers.

Display

The Alcatel 2000 has a 2.4-inch screen with a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels, and a TFT screen with a 262k colour display. In other words, it’s bare minimum and cannot be compared with other feature phones. The screen has a large font, which shows the time and beneath it, the date.

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Interface

The up and down key beneath the screen takes you through the phone’s six main menus. They are FM Radio, Contacts, Messages, Calculator, Others and Settings. Selecting Other gives you more options like My Files, Alarm, Calendar, Voice Alarm, SOS, Voice Assist Dialing, Call Log and Services.

Features

My Files lets you browse files on the phone or the microSD card. These include audio files, files received, images, videos and creations. By default the phone has voice assist dialing turned on, so when you press any number on the keypad, the number is read out aloud. This can be turned off if not required.

Voice Reminder could be a very handy feature for the elderly who need to be reminded to take medication, for example. Voice reminders can be recorded and playback times selected. If this feature is going to be used on a daily basis, getting a microSD card is recommended as the phone doesn’t have much built-in memory.

The SOS function requires a message to be saved first, and then up to five contact numbers to be saved for an emergency situation. The message takes up to 160 characters, which is the size of an SMS. So when an SOS message is sent out, be aware that the charge for this is in relation to how many contacts are saved under SOS.

Battery

Battery life on the Alcatel 2000 is 1 000mAh, which is pretty good for such a basic phone. It could easily last several days with average use. It promises up to seven hours of talk time and 500 hours on standby. This works out to 20 days of standby time. The phone takes 3.3 hours for a full charge.

Verdict

The very basic Alcatel 2000 phone is recommended for the elderly, people who are visually impaired or someone who has never had a phone before and needs something without complications. It is very simple to use and its voice dialling and voice reminder features could be a deciding factor for its intended target market.