Alcatel One Touch 511

Judging from the large number of print advertisements proliferating the newspapers these days, downloadable ringtones appear to enjoy a thriving trade. Despite the best intentions from cellphone makers, I would hardly classify the sounds emitting from a mobile phone as musical. The more poorly constructed handsets with tin-sy speakers and single-track melodies usually end up being irritating.

Alcatel's One Touch 511 makes a valiant attempt to change all that. The phone allows for eight different instruments to be played concurrently, including piano, xylophone, guitar, strings, and bass. The ringtone sounds like a normal MIDI file played through a first-generation PC sound card. While this isn't much, it's refreshing to finally hear the distinct sound of drum beats on a phone.

The Hills Are Alive
The OT511 resounds with 30 ringtones comprising an assortment of chimes and melodies, but only 10 of them can be considered polyphonic, so up to eight instruments can be played concurrently on the phone. The only way you can get hold of polyphonic ringtones is by downloading them from your network provider. The cost of each polyphonic ringtone has not been finalized yet but should be available once SingTel starts selling the phone this October 27. In fact, Alcatel has revealed that users will be able to download free ringtones from SingTel for a period of two weeks from the launch.

There is a ringtone composer built in, but this allows for only singe-track tones to be created.

Alternatively, the phone's voice memo feature allows you to record up to 5 minutes of sound and to use this as your ringtone or message alert. Don't expect high-fidelity playback, though, as the phone's recording mic is hardly top quality. Still, the voice memo was good enough that we had fun recording some choice South Park excerpts for incoming messages.

Looking Good
Alcatel has made huge leaps in design with the OT51. It is the French company's first phone with a built-in antenna, and is sufficiently cute in red and silver to attract the younger set. Other colors available include blue and gray. My cab driver took a minute to marvel at the lightness and compactness of the 75g phone, but added that it didn't feel solid enough to seem like a real phone.

The four-line text display uses the good old-fashioned green backlight, with the buttons lighting up dimly.

User Interface
The button feel for such a small phone is surprisingly good, with enough key depth and response.

There is also a handy bi-directional scrolling key which doubles as an "ok" button, which we found very convenient for one-thumb navigation of the phone menu, and then pressing "ok" to make a selection.

There aren't the usual buttons on the side of the phone for volume control—the scrolling key doubles up as that.

However, the software menus are not intuitively organized. The first level is broken up into "Services" comprising the WAP functions, while "Menu" contains all the other options. If you select Menu, you will see 10 choices, including one called "Setup" and another titled "My Setup". Apparently, the latter contains your customized options, while the former features the general settings of the phone.

Games
Alcatel has given an interesting twist to phone games here. The French company hired Infogrames to develop the OT511's three games. While we found these unspectacular, the games do feature some nifty sound effects, thanks to the polyphonic capability of the phone.

There is also an attempt to weave a story around the three very different games. The story goes that Starshot, a hero from deep space, travels throughout the galaxy to discover new entertainment. He is accompanied by two faithful companions, Willfall (the little robot) and Willfly (the little rocket). The player is supposed to help Starshot foil the traps set for him by the terrible Wolgang.

Plethora Of Features
The OT511 comes with Enhanced Messaging Service (EMS), making it the latest phone to support swapping of pictures, sounds and formatted text as SMS between compatible phones from Siemens and Ericsson.

The phone contains a 200kb internal memory to store polyphonic ringtones, voice memo, icons. We were not able to pack it with ringtones, but an Alcatel spokesperson said that he was able to store 25 polyphonic ringtones and some icons, and still had almost 100kb left.

A major oversight of the phone is its lack of support for data connections. You can't plug in a data cable, nor is there an infrared port. Flexible memory combined with data connectivity make for a formidable combination, as the Siemens S45 has demonstrated. This would have made the OT511 a clear winner if we had been able to download MIDI tracks into this Alcatel as polyphonic ringtones.

The WAP phone also comes with the usual features such as predictive text, calculator, vibration alert, and alarm clock.

Long Life And Clear Reception
The Lithium-ion battery is expected to offer 6 hours of talktime and 280 hours of standby. Under normal use, the phone lasted us a good four days, above the average two days. Despite the integrated antenna, we had no problems with reception. The voice of the other party came across loud and clear.

Conclusion
If you like dainty looks, the Alcatel OT511 is certainly a good buy at S$338 with a two-year contract. There are numerous features to keep you busy, but the OT511 may well be remembered as the phone that brought the word "polyphonic" into our CNET glossary.