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T-Mobile wants $150 Alcatel OneTouch Pop Astro to be its next budget star

The petite, entry-level phone features a 4.5-inch screen and goes on sale today.

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Jessica Dolcourt Senior Editorial Director, Content Operations
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The new OneTouch Pop Astro goes on sale with T-Mobile. Alcatel

Budget-seekers, T-Mobile is betting it has the phone for you. The Alcatel OneTouch Pop Astro is the latest in the no-contract carrier's constellation of low-cost smartphones. But it comes with a warning: this is a very entry-level device.

Going on sale April 29, the Pop Astro gives you 4G LTE and Android 4.4 on a 4.5-inch 960 x 540-pixel resolution on a basic TFT screen. There's a 5-megapixel camera on the back and a 0.3-megapixel camera on the front. These are extremely low specs compared to top-end smartphones, but the Pop Astro is also a fraction of the cost.

Inside, a 1.5GHz quad-core MediaTek MTK6732 processor meshes with 4GB of internal storage and 1GB RAM. A microSD card slot lets you expand your holdings to 32GB in all.

Battery life on the 2,000mAH ticker should last for up to 8 hours of talk time and about 10.5 days on standby. As a T-Mobile phone, the Pop Astro supports Wi-Fi calling and VoLTE.

None of this is exciting stuff, but Alcatel is only trying to wow you with the price. So, how much does this penny-pinching phone cost you? Just about $150 full retail ($149.76 to be exact), or $0 down, with $6.24 per month over the course of 24 months.