Alcatel's One Touch Fierce
While you may be tempted by T-Mobile's One Touch Fierce's $139.99 prepaid price, satisfying 4G speeds, and reliable call quality, be warned of its laggy processing performance and unimpressive camera.
Stylish silver back plate
The Fierce comes in two colors, slate and silver, with the latter featuring a nice brushed-metal look that adds a unique accent. But apart from the stylish battery door, the device feels cheap: hollow, plastic, and toylike.
Nonremovable battery inside
Underneath, you'll see a microSD card slot (that accepts cards of capacities up to 32GB), and a warning label. The label notifies users that the 1,800mAh battery inside is nonremovable. This is odd given the fact that you can take off the phone's back, and therefore would expect to be able to remove the battery.
Headphone jack for audio
The handset measures 5.13 inches tall, 2.64 inches wide, and 0.35 inch thick. Up top are a 3.5mm headphone jack and a sleep/power button. On the right edge lives a volume rocker and at the very bottom is a Micro-USB port for charging.
Sluggish quad-core CPU
A slower-than-expected 1.2GHz quad-core processor powers the Fierce. The camera lags, and on average it takes 28 seconds for the device to reboot. Quadrant results clocked in at 4,880, which is barely comparable to last year's HTC One X.
An unimpressive 5-MP shooter
Both the 5-megapixel camera and the VGA front-facing camera have 4x digital zoom, a "face beauty" shooting mode that lets you adjust your smoothness, skin color, and sharpness in a photo, geotagging, face detection, and a timer.
In need of a lint roller
For the most part, the phone's user interface stays true to a skinless version of Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. However, it also features some colorful icons that can be considered "playful" at best, though honestly, they look dated and childish.