Alcatel OneTouch Icon Pop Android Prepaid Phone with Triple Minutes (Tracfone)

Ok, first the GOOD this is the best Triple minute smartphone Tracfone puts out. The others are single and dual core with smaller screens. The Alcatel OneTouch Icon Pop has a 1.2ghz snapdragon 4 core processor and a built in FM radio digital tuner (it uses your headphones as a antenna so they need to be plugged in!) Android kitkat 4.4.2 and a 5 in screen that is plastic so it is hard to crack just get some good armor for the phone and you are set to go. Because it has such a strong processor it can easily play HVEC compressed video files. Just down load free Handbrake video software and compress large video files down with H265 video compression and add to your extra sd card. It has 5 Megapixal camera and a .3 front facing camera. Bluetooth 4 and GPS works great with Google maps if you get lost. It has 4gigs of internal memory but only 2gigs is available for your use and google software and preinstalled software takes up a large chunk of the 2gigs you have to work with. Now the BAD, you can not install extra apps to this phone's SD card: this means that you are limited on what you can install on internal memory so just be frugal don't install things you don't use all the time. This is a Kitkat 4.4.2 security development that can't be fixed by rooting phone because of Tracfone proprietary software that gets you Triple time. Oh this is really UGLY because Tracfone has already said they are not updating the firmware so don't ask. One last thing this phone can not read 64gig sd cards; the largest it can use is a 32gig sd card. This could be a awesome phone with extra internal memory and program access to SD card but alas it was not to be. If the phone manufacturers would smarten up they would make internal memory expandable to the user via external highspeed memory cards like we have on pc and laptops. Now you know the Good the Bad and the Ugly on this phone. Hope this helps

TracFone has for a while offered very low end smartphones for use with their service!!! My first was the Samsung Centura which is awful !!! Single core slow CPU and low amount of memory made running anything on that phone a hassle. it was so bad I almost gave up on TracFone which I loved for their low price and wide coverage area. I for the heck of it logged onto their site (TracFone's)and put in my zip code to see if they offered anything new that would work in my area and this phone popped up!! I could not believe my eyes while reading the specs of the phone. Quad core CPU, 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and much much more I started to drool. Needless to say I ordered one ( from somewhere else although I love Amazon ) and received the phone the other day. After transferring my time, minutes, and data from the old phone to this one, I started to play with it to see if there was a major difference. The first thing is the Screen!!! The color and resolution are great!!! Very fine detail!!! The screen is very responsive to the touch too. Next thing i noticed was the speed! There was no more lag. Touch an icon and the app pops up quickly. Setting up this phone was easy too. I have a wifi router in my house and with it setting up my phone with my email account was easy and done within a minute. Next I wanted to see how the camera worked. Seems like all the cameras on the smartphones that tracfone offered before in my area were 3 megapixel at most without autofocus at least that was the way it was on my old Samsung Centura. This camera is nice. No it's not Iphone quality, but it will capture great moments and places for you to remember. The pictures it takes are better in full sunlight, but I found the indoor shots nice too, the autofocus helps a lot. The flash is nice to have, but I have not had a chance to use it yet for many shots. The battery life lasts a long time for me. I make sure though not to let many apps run in the back round to help with this. To help with this review I must let you know the type of user I am. I am a person looking for a smartphone who doesn't need something like the Iphone 6, or Samsung galaxy s5. I just want something fast enough that can take a good to great picture and most of all not break the bank and have a good coverage area for calling where I live. To sum it up I am not a smartphone Power user. I don't want a monthly bill either. In the end I must say this phone along with the TracFone service are a perfect pairing. Tracfone finally offers a smartphone good enough to take advantage of their wonderful service. Also now you have a phone that is not light years behind in technology. For most everything i will do with my phone I would not be able to tell the difference between this a high end smartphone anyway besides maybe the camera which still takes good to great pictures. My hats off to TracFone and like another reviewer said this is a step in the right direction for TracFone!! I highly recommend this phone!! Take Care *********** Update ************I have now had this phone for a while and love it even more. My dad liked it too and bought himself one. I continue to learn more about the KitKat OS as time goes on. I have noticed the WIFi is very good in this unit. I can pick up the routers signal at work half way out in the parking lot and was not able to do that with my Samsung Centura or my Apple Ipod touch 5th Generation. Also I have learned the camera has many functions like HDR, Panorama, and burst mode. Truely a surprisingly good little phone at a great price. I'll update this if anything goes wrong or breaks but so far so excellant!!! Take care!********** Update 12/4/2015*********A Black Friday deal here on Amazon made me depart from my much loved Alcatel. Also Tracfone's Bring your own Phone (BYOP) Programallowed me to upgrade to that phone. I was looking for a new phone because I could not load more apps on the Alcatel. The apps I had on the phone only wanted to work from the phones built in memory not the extra memory card I had installed. So really running out of the phones memory started my quest looking for a new phone. However the speed and everything else about the phone is still great to this day. My dad still uses his Alcatel Icon pop and likes it very much. Yesterday he had to buy a new battery for it though. No big deal. The old one seems to just pop out and you just have to pop the new one in and it was dirt cheap too! I still think this is the best phone Tracfone Offers.

works perfectly