As a rebadged Alcatel handset, the Telstra Essential Plus isn't fancy, but it's also cheaper than many of the carrier's plans. If all you need is simple smartphone operation, it's an easy recommendation.
It's very cheap
4G capable
Android Oreo Go
Blue Tick certified
It would only go fast if you dropped it off a cliff
The latest rebranded Alcatel phone to arrive with a quick coat of Telstra paint is the Telstra Essential Plus. It's a slightly reworked Alcatel 1, which means it joins the very small family of phones running Android Oreo Go here in Australia. It's also only $99 outright, which means it's extremely affordable.
Design
Small in the hand.
Feels cheap (because it is).
Headphone socket included!
I chided Telstra for calling its rebadged Alcatel 3V the "Telstra Superior" because there wasn't much it was actually superior to, but for the Essential Plus, it's clear that the designers have only included the essentials and little more. Which logically speaking means that the Plus is slightly erroneous, unless there's a Telstra Essential also due to appear. That would probably be the existing, ever-so slightly cheaper Alcatel 1C, also on Telstra prepaid, I suppose.
Still, the Essential Plus has the essentials you'd want in a phone body, which is to say that it has a body. It's black. It's plastic. It measures in at 137.6x65.7x9.8mm with a carrying weight of 145g, so it's light in the hand and easy to carry. If you squinted a lot, or had some kind of visual acuity problem, you might fool yourself that it was an iPhone 3G, but you wouldn't fool anyone else.
In an era where premium handsets are rushing to dump 3.5mm headphone sockets, this is one essential feature still very much present on the Telstra Essential Plus, which is a nice plus.
Camera
A camera is present. That's about it.
Slow to start, slow to focus.
A camera is an essential part of any smartphone in 2018 and the Telstra Essential Plus very much has a camera present. Two to be precise, with a rear 5MP sensor and front-facing 2MP selfie camera. Even by the standards of budget phones that's pretty low-rent in a capability sense, although you shouldn't take megapixels as the one and only determinant of a phone's camera prowess.
Unfortunately, the Telstra Essential Plus doesn't go any further than that essential step of including a camera onboard, because even by budget standards, everything it does in the camera space is ordinary, or often worse.
It's slow to start, it's slow to focus and it's exceptionally good at blowing out photos, or leaving them incredibly noisy. You probably won't spot it too much if you leave the images on the phone itself, because its 4.95-inch 480x960 pixel display simply can't show too much detail, but as soon as they're off the phone you'll spot their limitations.
However, that's not exactly out of the ordinary for a phone in this price range. Just as the Telstra Essential Plus is a phone for folks who only need very basic performance, so is it entirely true for its camera, too. If you want snappier pictures, you'll simply have to pay more for the phone that's going to take them.
Performance
Slow application performance.
Android Oreo Go apps work a little better than you might think.
Display washes out a lot when flat on a desk.
The Telstra Essential Plus uses a Mediatek MT6739 processor paired up with just 1GB of RAM. As usual with budget handsets, it's a question of building down to a price point and putting up with the performance bottlenecks that creates, although the Telstra Essential Plus does have a slight edge here for actual app performance, which I'll get to shortly.
That does mean it's only fair to compare it against other budget solutions. A phone like the Galaxy Note9 runs Sonic the Hedgehog level rings around the Telstra Essential Plus, because of course it does, but how does it stack up against more budget-centric fare? Here's how it compares using Geekbench 4's CPU test:
You can essentially forget about any kind of 3D gaming action either, with the Telstra Essential Plus delivering the absolute lowest scores we've seen out of 3DMark's Slingshot Extreme Test. Just watching the test run was like watching a poorly crashing slideshow deck execute:
This isn't exceptional for a phone that costs less than $100 and that's something to keep in mind at all times when using the Telstra Essential Plus.
Where the Telstra Essential Plus at least tries to make the most out of its meagre resources is in the specific Android variant it's running. It's one of only a handful of phones in the Australian market running Android Oreo Go, Google's cut-down Android 8 tailored for low-power, low-cost devices.
Android Oreo Go comes with a variety of standard Android apps that are highly optimised. What this means is that apps that would otherwise struggle on the Telstra Essential Plus are a little bit quicker than you might expect, as long as you're using the Go-optimised versions. Google doesn't actually stop you installing any compatible Android app on Oreo Go phones, which means you can still use the "full fat" variants, or indeed just about any app on the Telstra Essential Plus. Do so and you'll be waiting a while for them to load or respond to input.
The Telstra Essential Plus features a 4.95-inch display with a quite low resolution of just 480x960, but that's not its biggest display performance problem. Lay it flat on a desk and the LCD backlighting will wash out almost all the detail on the handset. It's not an issue when it's in your hand, but if you have it on a desk and a notification pops up, or the phone rings, there's absolutely no way to easily view it and see any pertinent detail. Having a cheap display is totally fine on what is an exceptionally cheap phone, but I don't feel it's asking too much to be able to see what's on the screen.
The Telstra Essential Plus is priced in the same space as the cheaper Alcatel 1C. Its $10 price hike is well worth considering if you do need data connectivity because it's fully 4G LTE capable where the 1C is a 3G-only handset.
The Telstra Essential Plus is also notable as the cheapest smartphone on the Telstra network to pass through Telstra's mobile testing labs and come out the other side with Telstra Blue Tick certification. If you're a regional or rural user with reception concerns, this could be a very good way to solve them at low cost.
Battery life
Woeful battery life.
Where the Telstra Superior manages to pack in a respectable 3,000mAh battery, the smaller frame of the Telstra Essential Plus means it's only got space for two thirds of that quantity, with just 2,000mAh to play with.
Some budget phones actually do very well in straight line battery tests, thanks to low-resolution screens and low-power processors. The Telstra Essential Plus ticks both those boxes neatly, but still somehow managed to post Geekbench 4 battery scores that can only be described as woeful:
Its battery score is the lowest we've recorded to date and the only phone with a lower overall battery time in Geekbench 4's battery test was the Alcatel-produced Telstra Superior. That phone has a much better display than the Telstra Essential Plus, so it has at least got an excuse for poorer battery timing, at least partially.
Geekbench 4's battery test puts a linear strain on battery life, so it's not always indicative of how you'd actually use a handset. In less scientific daily testing, I could get the Telstra Essential Plus to last a single day between charges, but to be honest, that was largely because I didn't use it that much due to its inherent speed issues during test days. Charging is via micro USB and it's not notably quick, so forgetting to charge it overnight would be a poor move.
Verdict
Hard to argue against the value of a $99 4G smartphone.
Lots of folks might want one, but not everyone can afford one either.
If you're a very light user who needs a Blue Tick certified 4G handset on a very limited budget, the Telstra Essential Plus is a perfectly acceptable compromise device. You won't impress anyone with it and you will hit its performance ceiling very rapidly indeed, but if you primarily want a phone for calls, texts and just a little light web browsing, it would do that just fine.
A multi-award winning journalist, Alex has written about consumer technology for over 20 years. He has written and edited for virtually every Australian tech publication including Gizmodo, CNET, PC Magazine, Kotaku and more. He has also been the Editor of Gizmodo Australia, PC Mag Australia, CNET.com.au and the Tech and Telco section at Finder. Alex has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of New England and a serious passion for retro gaming.
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