When we got our first look at the Alcatel 3V at MWC 2018, we were cautiously intrigued: it's an inexpensive handset that nonetheless packs some of the headline features of this year's flagships.
There's that 6-inch FHD+ screen at the popular 18:9 aspect ratio, dual rear cameras with bokeh and portrait modes, a fingerprint scanner and face unlock.
But of course, any budget handset is a balancing act, and where there are exciting additions there will also be disappointing cuts. On the 3V, these include just 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage (albeit with microSD), a fingerprinty plastic casing, and an ugly Android overlay that combines with the case to make the whole thing a bit Fisher Price.
That said, there are plenty of reasons to consider the Alcatel 3V - not least the price - which we'll discuss in detail now we've had some quality time with it.
Alcatel 3V price and availability
- Launch price: $149 / £95 / AU$199
- Current price: $149 / £95 / AU$199
- Launch date: May 2018 (UK), June 2018 (US)
The Alcatel 3V is available now in the UK, and from early June in the US. In the UK, it's available in black or gold from Tesco Mobile for £95 on PAYG or £10 a month on contract.
In the US, the 3V will cost $149.99 from Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart, and will only be available in black.
The Alcatel 3V is also slated for an Australian release towards the third quarter of the year, with a price of AU$199.
Design and display
- 6-inch 1080 x 2160 display
- Glossy plastic back attracts fingerprints
- 162 x 76 x 8.1mm, 155g
From the front, this is a pretty generic-looking handset, to the point that we've mistaken it for our Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus several times.
A glossy black rectangle with rounded corners and the tall, slim design of an 18:9 phone, it's only when you turn on the display that the Alcatel 3V's differences from the S9 and similar flagships becomes apparent: thick black bands at the top and bottom of the screen, and a black border on either side (as you'd expect from a budget handset).
There's no branding on the front, and the bottom bezel holds neither capacitive buttons nor fingerprint scanner/home key. The nav keys are software-only, though there's plenty of space for them on the generously-sized screen.
Turning to the curved plastic sides, you'll find the dual SIM tray and textured power key to the right, a lightweight volume rocker on the left edge, annoyingly off-center headphone jack on the left of the top edge, and two sets of drilled holes either side of the central charging port on the bottom. It's the old style micro USB rather than the reversible type C.
Flip over to the back and you'll see one of the worst things about the handset: the thin, shiny plastic rear panel. It feels so flimsy and insubstantial that we actually checked to see if it was removable, as with the replaceable-battery phones of old - but it's not.
On the Spectrum Black and Spectrum Blue handsets (all three colors are labeled 'spectrum' for… reasons), it doesn't look too awful, but the Spectrum Gold colorway looks so cheap that it could pass for a toy.
Hold the phone to the light and you can even see where the plastic warps around the circular fingerprint sensor - check out the tree reflections apparently being sucked into the abyss:
The darker colors also have the downside of picking up a tremendous amount of finger grease. Almost instantly on picking up the phone, the back gets covered in marks and smudges. In certain lights you can even see a rainbow effect on the oil. Grim.
While that's all pretty disheartening, it's also relatively easy to fix: clip on the dotted plastic cover in the box, or even better, get a good-quality case, and you won't even remember the back panel.
Of course, with this being a relatively niche handset, you're going to have considerably fewer cases to choose from than if you were sporting a popular choice like the iPhone 8.
On the plus side of the Alcatel 3V's rear, it's good to see a fingerprint scanner on a handset this affordable, as well as the tell-tale oval enclosure of a dual-camera phone.
The metal-ringed, matt-textured fingerprint pad is easy to find without looking, and you don't end up smudging the camera lens as you do with some phones. It unlocks quickly with a little haptic feedback - generally the fingerprint unlock on this phone is faster than the face unlock, which feels laggy by comparison.
Another appreciated design feature on this budget handset is the large, sharp LCD screen. At six inches with a resolution of 1080 x 2160, the 18:9 IPS display offers just over 400 pixels per inch.
It's bright and well-saturated, although it suffers from the same fingerprint-magnetism as the back panel.
Thankfully that's more noticeable when it's off than on, but it's worth bearing in mind if you use a pattern to lock your phone: you might leave a map in finger grease. It's also not the easiest to see in bright sunlight.
And there's no Gorilla Glass protection over the top, so it might be worth investing in a screen protector alongside that case.
Battery life
- 3,000mAh battery just about lasts a day
- No fast charging
- Old-style USB port
While you do get some features on the Alcatel 3V to rival the big names, the battery has missed out on the innovations that make more expensive phones last longer.
There's no fast charging - which is a little disappointing as it's available on some fairly inexpensive phones now - and of course no wireless charging, which isn't surprising at all.
Battery stamina on the 3V is fairly average for a budget phone. With adaptive brightness on and moderate use (social media, a few calls, email), it will usually last you until bedtime, but no longer.
With more intensive activity, the battery drains noticeably faster than on more expensive phones, and it'll take you longer to charge it back up. While new mid-rangers like the Honor 10 can charge to 50% in half an hour, the budget category is still slow-charging, and it feels very slow on the Alcatel 3V.
You're also charging via the old-style micro USB port, rather than the reversible USB type C. That's not a huge deal, but having to turn the cable over until you find the correct orientation (because it's never right the first time) is one of the ways you're reminded this is a lower-end phone.
We ran our usual battery test on the Alcatel 3V, which involves streaming an HD video over Wi-Fi with brightness on max and accounts syncing in the background. From a full charge, the 3V had 65% left after 90 minutes.
That's not great, and the 35% lost doesn't compare well with the 3V's competitors: in the same test, the Nokia 2 lost 15%, the Moto G5 22%, and the Sony Xperia XA 29%, making the Alcatel 3V the worst of the bunch.
However, it does also have a bigger, higher-res screen than most of its rivals, which will account for a good chunk of that power loss. And you'll still be able to watch a whole feature film on a single charge without worry, which isn't the worst thing at this price point.
Camera
- Dual 12MP + 2MP rear cameras
- 5MP selfie camera
- 1080p (full HD) recording with EIS on main camera, 720p on front-facing
Dual-camera phones are the flavor of the month, and Alcatel has managed to find space in the 3V's budget to squeeze one in. However, while the sensors are 12MP and 2MP respectively, the main camera is described as 'up to 16MP', and if you look in the camera settings, you'll find the resolution has been set at 16MP by default.
We checked with Alcatel and they confirmed that the sensor is 12MP, but the phone uses some software trickery to artificially inflate the number of pixels in the image if you set it to 16MP. Similarly, the front-facing camera is 5MP but is set at 8MP by default.
The main camera can shoot video at up to 1080p, while the selfie cam can do up to 720p. However, whichever resolution you choose, videos taken on the front-facing camera look like someone got a bit over-keen with the 'Sharpen' filter.
Videos come out very grainy, especially on hair and other textures, and you can see the effect even before you hit record. Videos taken on the main camera, however, are fine.
The Alcatel camera app (which isn't the most intuitive - Settings is hidden within a menu that looks a bit like the Windows logo) includes some filters, plus various modes including panorama, time-lapse, night, light trace and portrait.
Portrait mode uses the 'live bokeh' feature that also appears in the Aperture (re-focus) mode. This attempts to soften the background of the image to give an SLR-like effect, but we found it very hit and miss, as you can see in the photo samples.
Refocusing the image is a nice gimmick but in practice, it doesn't work especially well - you have to shoot the image in Aperture mode, then open it in the camera app, which takes a while to load it up. Tapping to refocus mostly just makes the rest of the image ridiculously blurry.
For shooting normal photos in Auto, though, the Alcatel 3V is perfectly competent. Images come out a bit darker than expected, particularly given that we shot a lot of them in bright sunshine, but a touch of editing fixes that easily.
Selfie mode includes the usual soft-focus beauty option, which works fine (although don't overdo it if you want to still have a nose), and generally photos taken on both sides of this phone are plenty good enough to share. It could be a lot worse, considering the price.
Camera samples
Android, but with more gradients
- Android 8.0 Oreo
- Garish overlay
- Some bloatware
One of the things that stood out to us when we first tried this phone was the unsophisticated software overlay, and while we did get used to it with increased use, it will inevitably put some people off.
It's not terrible, and we've certainly seen worse, but Alcatel's aesthetic is very bright and cartoony, which combines with the lightweight, plasticky handset to give a cheaper feel than was necessary.
It helps to change the lock screen and wallpaper, but you're stuck with the primary-color, gradient-happy icons - unlike rival overlays including EMUI, where you can change the theme to something that suits you better.
That said, it is impressive that the Alcatel 3V runs Android 8 Oreo, the most recent iteration. At this price, it could have got away with an older version, especially with the overlay to disguise it.
The 3V does come with a bit of bloatware, including a 'rewards and discounts' app called Enjoy.Now, an optimizing app called Super Cleaner, Mobisystems' OfficeSuite app and Netflix.
You can uninstall some of these, including OfficeSuite and Enjoy.Now, but Super Cleaner and Netflix are there to stay. Honestly, considering the price, it could have been a lot worse - and a decent proportion of people buying this phone will likely install Netflix anyway.
However, Super Cleaner is quite annoying and will randomly pop up to safety check apps (like that known virus, Twitter). As with several notifications on this phone, the help text is written in fairly poor English, which doesn't help much to sweeten the pill.
Bright movies and light gaming
- Huge HD screen for games and movies
- Solo speaker and weak earphones
- Gaming performance is okay
There are two sets of five drilled holes on either side of the charging port on the bottom edge of the Alcatel 3V, but don't be fooled - only one is a speaker. The left-hand set of holes put out decent sound: a little thin, a little directional, and quite easily muffled, but perfectly workable.
On higher-bass songs and at louder volumes, the output isn't great quality and the back panel vibrates, but realistically, no one's going to be DJing a party with this handset. It's plenty good enough for showing your co-worker the weird noise your cat made at the weekend.
The Alcatel 3V comes with a black, Alcatel-branded set of earphones. These are earphones of the last resort.
In other words, you'll be grateful for them if you're on a two-hour train ride and realize you've forgotten your good ones, but otherwise, avoid: they're plasticky, uncomfortable, and leak sound like nobody's business. On the bright side, they use a 3.5mm plug because the 3V has a proper headphone port.
The big, beautiful screen on the 3V is ideally suited to movies and videos. However, you will notice the phone getting quite warm after streaming for a while. Similarly, it gets pretty toasty when you're playing games - 15 minutes of Pokémon Go left us with a handset that felt like it could fry an egg.
Gaming performance from the MediaTek MT8735A chipset is okay, but the 2GB of RAM does show. There's a noticeable lag sometimes, both in-game and when switching between apps.
Also, that 16GB of storage will run out FAST, especially considering around half of it is spoken for out of the box. If you want to keep photos, videos and other media on this phone, you're going to want a microSD card.
Benchmarks
- Low benchmark scores
- Comparable to the Samsung Galaxy S4
We ran the Geekbench 4 CPU test on the Alcatel 3V and got an average single-core score of 639 with a multi-core score of 1799. Comparing this with the Android benchmarks table, the 3V's computing power is roughly on a par with the Samsung Galaxy S4.
In other words, what was considered flagship performance in 2013 is now, 5 years later, available for under $200/£100.
Verdict
It's not what you might call an all-rounder, but considering the very low price, the Alcatel 3V manages to offer more than you might expect.
The generously-sized FHD+ screen, fingerprint scanner and face unlock options are high points, and while the lower-end chipset, low RAM and limited storage mean the experience isn't always smooth, a microSD card and a bit of patience makes up for most of it.
Gamers and photography fans should look elsewhere, though, as should anyone who wants stylish hardware and software, or a long-lasting battery.
Who’s this for?
The Alcatel 3V is for either people who want a decent Oreo handset without spending too much, or people looking for a good spare phone for emergencies.
While it has a few high-end features, this is ultimately a fairly low-end phone, so not one for power users.
Should you buy it?
If you're looking for an affordable phone with the latest version of Android (albeit with some extra colors on top) and a brilliant screen for movies and videos, the Alcatel 3V should suit you perfectly. But do get a nice case to mitigate the feeling of using a child's toy.
First reviewed: May 2018
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