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Prepaid wireless carriers Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile USA added the $70 Alcatel Dawn smartphone to their lineups, giving users looking for a low-priced handset with plenty of features another option.
The Alcatel Dawn (pictured) is a 4G/3G LTE-capable smartphone that includes a 4.5-inch Full WVGA (854 by 480) thin-film-transistor touch-screen display, a 1.1GHz quad-core processor, 1GB of memory and 8GB of on-board storage. Also featured is a microSDHC slot that accepts storage cards up to 32GB, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, a front-facing VGA camera and a removable 1,780mAh battery.
The Alcatel Dawn smartphone also includes Bluetooth 4.1 and WiFi connectivity and can be used as a mobile hotpot. The handset, which is also mobile-capable in Mexico, runs on the Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system.
The device is 5.20 inches long, 2.56 inches wide, 0.39 inches thick and weighs 5 ounces.
The Dawn by Alcatel is the lowest-priced smartphone being offered by Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile so far this year, according to the companies. The handset includes email and text messaging capabilities. It comes with a charger and USB 2.0 cable, an installed SIM card and a printed Get Started Guide.
The phones are available from both companies through their online stores, Boost Mobile retail stores and select independent wireless retailers in the United States.
Both Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile offer prepaid, no-contract wireless plans for customers, with no long-term commitments. Boost Mobile’s calling plans start at $35 a month and offer free included data upgrades of up to 3GB per account to its prepaid mobile customers who pay their bills on time for at least 18 months. Boost customers get 500MB of additional included data per month on their “Growing Data” plans after they pay each of three monthly bills on time. After six months of on-time payments, customers will earn 1GB of additional included data, and so on, up to 18 months, when they can earn a maximum bonus of 3GB of additional data.
The bonuses mean that a customer with a $35 plan, which includes 2GB of high-speed data, can bump that up to 5GB of included data after 18 months of on-time payments, while a customer with a $45 plan, which includes 5GB of high-speed data, can bump it up to 8GB after the 3GB bonuses. The data performance in all the plans drops to 2G when the monthly data limit is reached. Also offered is a $60 a month unlimited data plan. Each cellular plan is dropped in price by $5 a month if a customer selects an automatic payment option.
Virgin Mobile calling plans are priced at $30 a month for 500MB of high-speed data and unlimited talk and texting, $40 a month for 4GB of high-speed data and unlimited talk and texting, or $50 a month for 6GB of high-speed data and unlimited talk and texting. Customers can add more high-speed data at $5 for 1GB or $10 for an extra 2GB of data.
Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile are divisions of the Sprint Prepaid Group and operate on Sprint’s networks. Both companies also offer unlimited music streaming to customers through certain music-streaming networks.
In June, Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile USA are now offering the $80 LG K3 budget smartphone to their prepaid customers, giving them another choice in their always-expanding Android handset lineups.
Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile USA added the LG K3 smartphone to their prepaid phone lineups, according to an earlier eWEEK story. The new handset featured a 4.5-inch Full Wide VGA In-Plane Switching touch-screen display (854 by 480 pixels), a Qualcomm 210 MSM8909 1.1GHz quad-core processor, 1GB of memory, a 1,940mAh rechargeable battery, 8GB of on-board storage (up to 3.10GB of usable storage) and a microSD slot that supports external storage cards up to 32GB. Also included in the LG K3 is a five-megapixel rear-facing camera with flash and HD video recording capabilities and a VGA front-facing camera with VGA video recording capabilities.