Planning to buy a mid range dual sim mobile phone for my parent. Have looked at the Alcatel Onetouch dualsim phone for $168 but decided that the 3.2 inch screen was a little fiddly.
Preferably 3.5 inch or bigger (catering for long sightedness)
Any advice? She only uses Lycamobile so lack of 3g on the second sim is not an issue.
Dual-sim = probably only cheap random asian brands.
But anyways my recommendation if you buy such phones. AVOID MTK/MT6516 based phones, painfully slow and no 3g.
Their successor MTK6573 is pretty decent though in comparison (650 MHz ARM11 CPU + SGX531 GPU), performance is comparable to the Qualcomm MSM7227 found in phones like the wildfire S and the lower end Xperia X10 mini + X8.
MTK6573 phones i know you might want to look for are:
H7300 is an okay choice, has a big 4.3 in screen. From what i've found there was some community support with a rooted custom rom already out for it. One thing though is that the battery life is questionable as with any chinese phones and is not compatible with the batteries that the phone is faking (HD7)
http://www.merimobiles.com/H7300_4_3_android_2_3_With_Dual_C…
X18i is also another MTK6573 based chinaphone. Haven't seen any rom support for it but it doesn't look too bad plus it uses the exact same batteries as the real (SE Xperia Arc) so if the OEM chinese batteries are crap you can always buy a proper one or an extended one (http://www.dealextreme.com/p/replacement-high-capacity-3-7v-…).
http://www.merimobiles.com/X18i_Ultra_thin_PDA_Smartphone_wi…
If you look around I'm sure you can find these aforementioned phones slightly cheaper elsewhere. From what I recall I remember seeing the X18i for 165$ somewhere.