Last spring, Google said it was taking another shot at reworking Android to keep it running fast and smooth on lower-end devices. The initiative was called Android Go, and the very first phone running it — technically, “Android Oreo (Go Edition)” — is being announced today by Alcatel. It’s called the Alcatel 1X, and, well, it’s not all that much to get excited about.
That’s partly because the 1X is a low-end phone, which means it has to impress on value rather than specs and flourishes. But it’s also because, in our initial hands on with the phone, the operating system didn’t run all that smoothly, despite Google’s optimizations. Stay tuned as we’ll have more impressions on Android Go throughout the week, but Alcatel hasn’t given us a thrilling first look.
The first unit of the 1X that I tried out was so sluggish as to feel broken. The app drawer stuttered every time it was flung open, the camera couldn’t hold an image, and I somehow watched the dialer render from low to high res after it opened. I didn’t know that was possible.
I tried out a second unit of the 1X just to see if all was the same, and for some reason, that unit was working much better, despite there being no apparent hardware differences — there was still stuttering all over the interface, but the phone was at least fairly quick about getting through it. The experience wasn’t exactly good, but it at least didn’t feel broken.
