ailsun rattlesnake: Hands-on with ZTE Engage and Alcatel Authority for Cricket

Friday, September 21, 2012

Hands-on with ZTE Engage and Alcatel Authority for Cricket

With September's spate of big smartphone reveals now safely out of the way, it's time for the smaller carriers to trot out their new mobile wares. And here at Pepcom's event in New York City, Cricket's showing off two newly announced phones -- both from OEMs that haven't quite achieved household name recognition. The powerfully named devices -- ZTE Engage and Alcatel Authority -- are actually rather modest in the spec department. ZTE's handset sport a 4-inch WVGA display, an 8-megapixel rear camera and runs a vanilla version of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich atop a single-core CPU clocked at 1.4GHz. As you might imagine, there's a definite lag when navigating through the homescreens and even when accessing the app drawer, but that's simply par for the course with a phone of this low-end caliber. Alcatel's 4.3-incher is actually the nicer looking of the duo, oufitted with the same 800 x 480 resolution and processor, but that's where the similarities stop. Like that other ZTE phone we just spent time with, this handset ships with Gingerbread onboard, so it's certainly no screamer. We're still waiting on official pricing and release dates for both devices, but you can likely count on an October retail bow. In the meantime, check out the gallery below for some extra shots.

Gallery: ZTE Engage hands-on