T-Mobile Gets Its First Windows 10 Mobile Smartphone

This is one of those good news/bad news deals: Windows 10 Mobile is finally heading to T-Mobile with the Alcatel Onetouch Fierce XL. Which, sadly, is yet another low-end Windows phone.

“We strive to provide our customers a wide selection of price points, operating systems and capabilities when it comes to choosing a smartphone, so adding the Fierce XL to our hardware line-up was a no-brainer,” T-Mobile VP Roger Brown is credited with saying. “This will be our first Windows 10 device to hit T-Mobile stores nationwide, and since the Fierce XL is coming from Alcatel, our customers know the build quality and feature set will be top notch.”

I’m happy to see T-Mobile getting in the game, but I wish the Fierce XL were a bit more, um, fierce. It’s a low-end phone thanks to its quad-core 1.1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, though it’s RAM (2 GB) and internal storage (16 GB) are arguably mid-range. (You can expand the latter with up to 32 GB of microSD-based storage.)

The screen isn’t half-bad on paper: It’s a 5.5-inch HD (1280×720 pixels) unit. The cameras 8 MP back and 2 MP front, and the Fierce XL of course supports LTE, plus VoLTE and T-Mobile Wi-Fi calling compatibility, and “FCC Mandated Anti-Theft Protection.” Not sure why the caps there.

A lot of the discussion around Windows 10 Mobile is boilerplate: the Office Mobile apps, Cortana, Microsoft Edge, and so on. There’s no discussion of Continuum because, naturally, this device isn’t powerful enough.

It’s not clear when this device will be available or how much it will cost.