Last spring, Google said it was getting another chance to work with Android again. to keep you up and running quickly and smoothly on low-end devices. The initiative was called Android Go, and the first phone running it, technically, "Android Oreo (Go Edition)," will be announced today by Alcatel. It's called the Alcatel 1X, and, well, it's not all that exciting.

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 OS didn't perform that well, 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 first look.

The first 1X unit I tried was so slow it felt broken. The app drawer stuttered every time it opened, the camera couldn't hold an image, and somehow I watched the scoreboard render from low to high resolution once it opened. I didn't know that was possible.

I tried a second unit of the 1X just to see if everything was the same, and for some reason, that unit worked much better, even though there were no apparent hardware differences, there was still stuttering throughout the interface, but the phone was at least fast enough to get over it. The experience wasn't exactly good but at least she didn't feel broken.

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

 One not-so-bright spot is that some models of the phone will not include a fingerprint sensor. (They will include Alcatel's "Face Key" facial recognition feature). The phone will launch in April for ? 100 for a single SIM variant and ? 110 for a dual SIM variant.