Which phone do you use? The typical answer for such a question would be, “Apple”, “Samsung” or “Nokia”.

In a world dominated by the big boys, there exists a smaller, but significant market for budget phones like GFive, Spice, Lava, Micromax and Alcatel.

Most of the phones in the second list are made in China and Korea. I had previously tried using a couple of them, but their performance was far from satisfactory.

A few days ago, I was tempted by a low price offered by a dealer and got hold of an Alcatel One Touch phone, co-branded with Tata Docomo.

Tata Docomo had launched the phone over a year ago, but I had not bought it because I was sceptical about the quality after my experience with such brands. At that time, the price was quite high too. However, the offer was too tempting to resist and I decided to go ahead and buy the phone.

I was pleasantly surprised by the build quality. The keypad exceeded my expectations considering the price tag it came with. The only issue was that I was unable to connect to the internet for using the bundled Yahoo services that came with the phone.

The service provider tried their best to get it working, but I gave up after a point and decided to look for solutions online. I was surprised again to find that Alcatel had a good web site. The site also offered a download of PC Suite for the phone. And there was something else that I didn't expect - a firmware upgrade. I downloaded the software and connected the phone. The instructions were clear and the upgrade took hardly a few minutes.

There was one more surprise - the default browser and Yahoo services now connected without a hitch! The Web site too, was well designed with lot of info and FAQs not normally found even in sites of top mobile phones.

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