If you are keen enough, our report on the launch of the Idol 4 and Idol 4S does not have any mention of Alcatel OneTouch. This is because it has been dropped in favour of just Alcatel.
Alcatel OneTouch was the brand name used on products made by Chinese company TCL which once had a partnership with French company Alcatel (before the Lucent partnership happened). The French company eventually sold its stake in the partnership to TCL hence the rights to the Alcatel branding. TCL went with the OneTouch branding mainly for marketing and other reasons. Like differentiating its products from those previously released by its former partner. This is despite the fact that it continued to benefit from consumers’ continued association of the new brand with the old one.
With Alcatel-Lucent now safely a part of Nokia and for old times’ sake (remember when there were Alcatel phones in the early 2000s?), any ambiguity associated with the Alcatel name is now gone. For familiarity’s sake and to shorten things a bit as it looks to the future, the brand will be just Alcatel. Many of us already referred to it as such anyway so not much will change.
There’s something changing that we can’t ignore though: there’s a new.
The old Alcatel OneTouch logo
The new Alcatel logo
Even with the new changes, this is not to say that we are hearing the last of the OneTouch brand on Alcatel devices. The new Idol 4 smartphones have a OneTouch Music application preloaded that plays well with the audio tweaks made possible by Alcatel’s partnerships with Wave and JBL.
The change comes at a time when the company has unveiled a wide range of new devices. It’s new Pop 4 smartphones target the budget smartphone buyer while the Idol 4 devices target those who want feature-packed quality smartphones without breaking the bank.
The company is also focusing more on young people and tuning its products to appeal to the younger demographic (the reason officially cited as being behind the name change).
