Introduction
It's always tricky for a budget brand to climb the ladder and Alcatel's attempt to break out of the basement and claim some mid-range success with the Idol Alpha is a good example.
At first glance this looks like an expensive smartphone, but the premium aluminium exterior and intriguing translucent strips are concealing a multitude of sins.
Looking past the beautiful body we find a 4.7-inch 720p screen, a quad-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz, just 1GB of RAM and a 13MP main camera. There are a lot of disappointments with this phone, but the main stumbling block for potential buyers is going to be the price tag.
The average selling price of Android smartphones has been falling steadily for the last couple of years. IDC reckons it will be as low £160 this year for an unlocked phone. The market is fiercely competitive and at around £280 off-contract, the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha doesn't stand out of the mid-range crowd.
If it's looking to attract people upgrading from the budget sector, then it's not working hard enough.
Consider that £229 will get you the vastly superior OnePlus One. Shop around and an extra few quid will score you an LG G3. You may even prefer one of the now heavily discounted flagships of yesteryear, like the Galaxy S4.
Why does Alcatel think you should fork out so much money for the Idol Alpha? Limited availability means that you probably will need to buy it off-contract if you want one. Is it worth spending nearly £300 on?
Design
After removing the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha from the unusual metal cylinder it comes in I was genuinely impressed. It has an aluminium body with polished chamfered edges and there are two interesting translucent strips at the top and bottom.
It's a nice size and it's easy to operate one-handed. It measures 138 x 66.6 x 7.5 mm and weighs in at 117.4g.
The aluminium frame feels cold and expensive, not unlike the iPhone 5S. It gives the Idol Alpha a satisfying weight, but the premium bubble bursts when you discover that the metallic looking back is actually plastic.
Sadly the translucent strips are also plastic and they protrude slightly, which definitely makes the idol Alpha feel a little less sexy. Their purpose becomes apparent when you turn the phone on and a series of LEDs lights them up. It's a really nice, imaginative twist on your standard LED notification.
There's a speaker and front-facing camera at the top and you'll find the standard three capacitive buttons below the screen, although they are unmarked and don't light up, which is a little strange.
The icons to identify them appear on the translucent strip at the bottom. The haptic feedback makes it clear when you've hit them, as does the onscreen action, but it does feel odd at first.
Flipping over to the back we find the camera lens and flash at the top left, then the Alcatel logo with a shiny embossed OneTouch logo beneath.
At the bottom there's a huge speaker grille with a knobbly bit either side, presumably to stop the grille touching surfaces when you put it down and reduce the chance of dust getting in there.
The back doesn't come off, so there's no removable battery, and there's no microSD card slot either.
Both the top and bottom edges are naked, which is aesthetically pleasing, but not practical. The biggest annoyance is the microUSB port which is right at the bottom of the left spine. This makes it awkward to use the Idol Alpha when it's charging.
To make matters worse there is no 3.5mm headphone jack. You have to use the supplied adapter to plug your headphones into the microUSB port if you want to use them.
Having that jut out the side makes it awkward to use comfortably with the phone in your pocket, which is why you generally find the headphone port on the top of a phone.
Nearer the top of the left edge you'll find a SIM tray. You pop it open using the supplied tool and it takes a microSIM card.
Jumping over to the right edge we find the power button and the volume rocker above it. They look stylish, but they only protrude a tiny bit so they aren't always easy to press without looking.
My review model is a grey, slate colour, but you can also pick the Idol Alpha up in three shades of gold.
The 4.7-inch IPS LCD screen has a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels which gives it a pixel density of 312ppi. It looks just fine at first glance. If you're coming from an older phone it won't bother you, but it's obviously inferior to 1080p and way behind the QHD displays that are hitting the market now.
All in all the Idol Alpha's design is its strongest selling point. The aluminium frame is reminiscent of the iPhone 5S and the translucent strips are a really nice idea that works well, but look a little closer and you can see the premium quality isn't consistent.
It's a mixed bag with some odd choices, most notably are the microUSB placement and lack of a headphone jack.
Key features
The mid-range Android market can definitely be a bit bland and samey. The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha is not blessed with a lot of USPs. The specs are distinctly average and there's really nothing here that's out of the ordinary.
Aesthetic style is the only thing that differentiates this phone. That chamfered aluminium frame is very attractive. It feels a bit like an oversized iPhone 5S, and while the plastic back definitely detracts from that impression, you don't often find this kind of design in Android's mid-range market.
You might fall in love with the translucent strips containing that pulsing LED. It flashes when the phone rings or there's an incoming message, which looks undeniably cool, but also does a great job of catching the eye.
The top one stays lit when the Idol Alpha is charging. They're stylish and functional, which is the killer combo. There's also a lighting menu where you can customize the behaviour.
Alcatel has made some effort to add value with its own UI and a smattering of pre-installed apps. It's good to see a radio app on there and basic utilities like note-taking and a torch are covered, but there is some bloatware too.
Thankfully you do have the option to uninstall some of these but others, like Deezer, can only be disabled. Considering you only have around 13GB of 16GB free to play with out of the box, it's a bit annoying.
There's a good setup guide that will certainly help smartphone newbies get to grips with Android, but Alcatel's skin doesn't improve on stock Android and there are some redundancies where Alcatel apps offer the same functionality as Google apps.
You could possibly point to the 13MP camera as another USP. The Nexus 5 is about the same price and it only has an 8MP shooter, but it's not just about megapixel count.
The Idol Alpha camera has a decent range of features and it's fast. It would have been a really noteworthy surprise on a mid-ranger a couple of years ago, but it's becoming more common to find a decent main camera beyond the flagships now. I'll get into how it actually performs in detail later.
Interface and Performance
You'll find that the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha is running Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. With Android 4.4.4 KitKat out and about, and Android 5.0 Lollipop making its way onto most phones, that's not a good thing. There's no telling when, or even if, it will get an update.
Alcatel's skin over the top is another mixed bag. The lock screen features a bouncing ball in a circle and you drag it down to the lock icon to unlock the phone, or you can shortcut to phone, messaging or camera by dragging left, up or right respectively.
The animation sometimes sticks and you have to try again, which doesn't create a great impression.
Once you're in you'll find a fairly light touch. The notification shade is stock, but the capacitive touch button at the bottom right is still menu rather than multitasking.
Press it once and you get an ugly pop up menu in white. Long press it and you get the line-up of your open apps, but it's weirdly confined to the bottom of your screen.
I don't really understand why Alcatel has done this and found it very annoying. I'm used to that being multitasking so it tripped me up repeatedly. Even Samsung has done away with the menu button as a default now.
It's mostly familiar Android territory, but there are a few different options in the menu. For example, the status bar entry allows you to decide which app's notifications should and shouldn't appear in the status bar.
They'll still appear in the notification shade when you pull it down, you just won't get the little icons at the top.
There are also a couple of optional gestures that allow you to flip over the phone to mute or shake to switch music.
It's quite common to find an app on your Android phone that allows you to schedule quiet time and set your phone to turn off connections or stay silent during certain hours, such as while you sleep.
Sony offers Smart Connect, there's Motorola Assist, Samsung has Blocking Mode. Alcatel's option to schedule times of day for your phone to turn off or on has to be the most basic version of this I've ever seen and it's buried in the settings menu, but at least it's there.
Basic setup is a breeze and the guide that prompts you about how to edit your home screen and things like that will definitely be handy for newcomers to Android.
Dig into the guts of the OneTouch Idol Alpha and you'll find a MediaTek chipset. The quad-core processor is rated at 1.2GHz and backed up by an average 1GB of RAM.
The animations when you're navigating around stutter sometimes. The Idol Alpha also noticeably lags coming in and out of apps on occasion. It's not consistently awful, but there are hiccups often enough to make it annoying.
It handled basic games like Clash of Clans without a problem, but Asphalt 8 was a different story. It took an age to load, had trouble handling the graphics, and it felt unresponsive and laggy.
When I quit the game it paused and a loading bar for the home screen launcher popped up for a second. If you like graphically intensive games then forget about this phone.
When I ran Geekbench 3 the Idol Alpha's multi-core score was 1082. That's just absolutely horrible. The Nexus 5 scored 2832 the last time we tested, the OnePlus One scored 3050, and even the mid-range HTC Desire 816 managed 1463.
With less than 13GB free out of the box and no option to expand via microSD card, storage is going to be a concern for some people. If you're a big gamer, or you want to load up TV shows or movies to watch then you're going to run low on space pretty quickly.
Battery life and the essentials
Battery life
The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha has a 2,000mAh battery and there's no prospect of carrying a spare because it can't be removed. It's not as big a battery as the latest and greatest. In fact, it's definitely too small.
The Nexus 5 has a 2,300mAh battery and I found it made for average performance. The Idol Alpha is not as efficient.
Ten minutes playing Clash of Clans ate 3% of the battery, while the graphically intensive Asphalt 8 ate 5% in ten minutes. Twenty minutes of browsing in Chrome ate another 5%.
In one night, while I was sleeping, the Idol Alpha managed to drop 14% and there were no incoming calls or messages during that period. It really shouldn't be draining that much when idle, and unfortunately a glance at the battery usage statistics did not solve the mystery.
I'm definitely a heavy user and I had to charge the Idol Alpha every day. It didn't even reach the end of the day before needing to be plugged in on more than one occasion in the week I was using it. Casual users will probably get by fine with a nightly charge, but there's no escaping the fact that the battery life is poor.
Our 90 minute video battery test, with the screen at full brightness, drained the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha from fully-charged down to 73%. That compares to 74% for the Nexus 5 and 83% for the OnePlus One.
Google has improved power efficiency since 4.2 Jelly Bean was released, so there is hope that the Idol Alpha will get a little more staying power with an update, but there's no telling when that might happen.
The essentials
As a phone the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha is perfectly adequate. It imported contacts from my Google account during setup. Call quality was fine and clear outdoors.
Testing it indoors revealed a much weaker performance with the other caller cutting out fairly frequently. I don't get great reception in my home, but the Idol Alpha was noticeably worse at handling calls than my Xperia Z2.
The basic apps from Alcatel are very barebones. They function reasonably well; they just don't look great or have an overabundance of features.
There's an FM radio app, which is handy when you're out and about, particularly as this phone does not support LTE. The torch app is boosted by the LED strips top and bottom. There's a nice weather app with a minimalist widget. You'll also find a file manager, a note taking app and a handful of other utilities.
Alcatel has also included a batch of OneTouch branded apps. The quality of the curated selection of apps in OneTouch Live is debatable, but you might appreciate it. The backup app could prove handy and there's a dedicated app for sharing your screen, though it didn't seem to be able to detect any of my other devices.
The preinstalled apps are a real mixed bunch. Things like Evernote and WhatsApp are potentially handy, Gameloft Live less so, but regardless of their usefulness you might prefer to choose them yourself. Thankfully most of them can be uninstalled.
You'll find a batch of apps organised into folders when you swipe onto the third home screen. Google's offerings are tucked in here and the Idol Alpha has the same redundancies you'll find on many other Android smartphones.
There's a basic browser, but Chrome is there too and it's better. There's a basic messaging app, but Hangouts is there too and it's better. There's a basic gallery app, but Photos is there too and it's better. The list goes on.
Another weakness I found with the Idol Alpha was web browsing. Chrome is a bit faster than the basic browser, but it still stuttered fairly frequently. There's also a problem with the screen brightness. On auto it consistently went too bright for comfort and at times it started to whiteout the detail in images.
Overall the display is too bright and even when you choose the lowest brightness setting it's actually a bit painful to read if you're in a darkened room. On the flipside you'd expect it to have good sunlight legibility, but the screen is quite reflective so it doesn't.
Camera
On paper the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha has an impressive main camera. It's rated at 13.1MP, it has an LED flash, and it can record 1080p video.
In reality it's a very easy camera to use and it's fast at capturing a shot, as long as it isn't HDR. You can go from the lock screen to shooting a photo in around three seconds, which is great for catching those spontaneous moments. The results I got were reasonably good on the whole.
The app is straightforward to use and clear. You touch to focus and you can touch and hold to take a burst of shots. There is a HDR mode and also a night, sports, and panorama mode. If you want to dig deeper you can set the ISO and exposure manually.
Video recording is also solid. You can capture full HD 1080p video at 30 frames per second. The only options offered are three different quality levels. It's smooth and the automatic settings handle action quite well.
The front-facing camera is a 1.3MP snapper that can record 720p video. It will do just fine for video calls, but it's not going to satisfy selfie addicts.
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Media
The display on the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha is good enough to enjoy video content and engage in a blast of gaming.
If you're inside then you're going to want to turn the brightness down and the colour saturation is noticeable at times, but it's perfectly watchable for streaming Netflix or YouTube.
It can also handle basic games like Clash of Clans without a hitch. Graphically intensive titles like Modern Combat 5 or Asphalt 8 don't fare as well. Expect slow loading times, stuttering, and lag when you exit.
The main speaker is on the back so if you're listening without headphones, then be careful not to cover it up with your hand. The volume is limited and if you crank it to the max it starts to distort. You're definitely better off with headphones.
The music and video apps are incredibly basic, but they support a decent range of file types and were able to play back everything I tested.
There is a widget for the music player if you want to use it, and you can create playlists and order by album, artist, or song name, but you'll find a multitude of better options in the Play Store.
I had no problems watching Netflix on the Idol Alpha and it was quick to load a high quality stream. It also worked fine for choosing content and streaming to my Chromecast.
I also tested Spotify without any issues. You'll need headphones and the adapter for the microUSB is annoying, but aside from that it works just fine for listening to music.
With around 13GB of your 16GB storage available and no micro SD card slot, you might feel space is limited.
If you like to have movies or a big music collection on your phone then it will be a problem. Games like Asphalt 8 are over 1.5GB, but then it performs so poorly you won't want to install it anyway.
Google gives you 15GB and the option to automatically backup photos in the cloud, so that's a handy boost.
The OneTouch backup app that comes preinstalled is something of a mystery as the user agreement is in Chinese, but it appears to just link up with your existing accounts on Dropbox, Box or Google Drive.
Comparison
Google Nexus 5
It's more than a year old now, but for £300 the Nexus 5 still looks a better buy than the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha, if you can get hold of one.
It has a slightly bigger, full 1080p resolution display, a much faster processor, double the RAM, supports LTE, and boasts the very latest version of Android.
The only thing, beyond the design, that the Idol Alpha has to tempt you is the 13MP camera, compared to the 8MP camera on the Nexus 5.
Alcatel's interface does not really add any value over stock Android and you could snag all of the preinstalled apps for free in the Play Store. In every other measurable way the Nexus 5 is better.
- Read the full Nexus 5 review
OnePlus One
In terms of specs the OnePlus One, with its 5.5-inch 1080p display and Snapdragon 801 chipset with a 2.5GHz quad-core processor backed by 3GB of RAM, is in a different class.
In terms of price it's actually cheaper than the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha at just £229 for the 16GB model.
The OnePlus One also boasts a 13MP camera, a 5MP front-facing camera, support for LTE, the latest version of Android KitKat, and the hugely customizable CyanogenMod.
The main detractor for many potential customers of the OnePlus One, apart from the invite system, is a lack of trust for the brand and maybe a concern about aftercare if something goes wrong.
Alcatel certainly has a longer track record, but it doesn't have a great reputation, so I really can't see a reason to pick it over OnePlus.
- Read the full OnePlus One review
Samsung Galaxy S4
It may be old news, but sometimes yesterday's flagship is a better bet than today's mid-ranger and you can pick up a Galaxy S4 for around the same price as the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha. It boasts a 5-inch 1080p display, a quad-core processor rated at 1.6GHz, and 2GB of RAM.
You also get a 13MP camera, 2MP front-facing camera, and an incredible array of extras from Samsung. The Idol Alpha has a more premium feel and a more arresting look, but the S4 is a better phone.
- Read the full Samsung Galaxy S4 review
Verdict
Why does Alcatel think it can sell the OneTouch Idol Alpha for £280? Having played with it for a week I honestly can't explain. It doesn't seem likely that any carriers in the UK will pick it up, so you're looking at paying the full whack up front.
The simple truth is that you shouldn't buy it because there are too many better options at around the same price tag.
It isn't an awful smartphone by any means, and I do like the exterior design, but I want to do more than look at my phone. People seeking an entry-level phone will find plenty to tempt in the budget bracket, this is presumably supposed to attract anyone upgrading and on that basis it's destined for failure.
We liked
Those shiny chamfered edges are lovely. The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha looks like a premium device.
When the translucent segments light up, so do I. It's a genuinely innovative design touch and you don't see them very often, especially in the mid-range segment.
The camera is easy to use and fast at capturing a shot. The detail level is good and the burst mode is handy. Video recording is solid. Overall it's far from perfect, but it definitely goes in the plus column.
We disliked
The stuttering is a major turn off. A combination of Alcatel's skin, the processor, and the lack of RAM is causing it to lag and even struggle sometimes. Poor performance during graphically intensive games and in the browser simply isn't good enough for a phone at this price.
You can't even get through a busy day on a single charge. The battery life is weak and it drops surprisingly fast at times.
The OneTouch Idol Alpha would obviously benefit from the latest version of Android. It could help soothe the stuttering and extend the battery life. Alcatel should update it as soon as possible.
And the omission of a headphone jack - now that's just plain crazy.
Final verdict
The experience of using the Idol Alpha definitely doesn't live up to the early promise. There are an awful lot of other Android smartphones that match or surpass the hardware and software on offer here and cost the same or less.
If you're wondering why you should buy the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha, the short answer is you shouldn't.
from TechRadar: Technology reviews http://ift.tt/1AVCN31
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