Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha Review

Introduction

The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha (also known as the Idol α) is a phone that you won’t mistake for any other - it features an outstanding design with a sleek body outfitted with translucent strips of plastic on the top and bottom. It’s something for those who value singularity in style and at the same time don’t want to spend a fortune on a device.

If - for a moment, though - we forget about the stylish looks of the Idol Alpha, you’d see that in it’s essence, this is nothing but a fairly typical mid-range phone: it features a 4.7” 720 x 1280-pixel display, a quad-core MediaTek system chip, and a 13-megapixel camera. It lacks 4G LTE connectivity and expandable storage, but those are trade-offs that might be acceptable if Alcatel has priced this right, and if it delivers for all else. So does it? Let’s take a look.

In the box:

• User Manual
• microUSB Cable
• Wall Charger
• In-ear headphones

Design

The exquisite design with a set of two translucent strips of plastic make it look like no other phone out there.

The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha is an exquisite phone with diamond-cut edges, aluminum mainframe and sides (it’s got a plastic back, though), as well as a stylish and unique translucent plastic strips on the top and bottom. The plastic strip on the top even lights up to show you missed notifications, a way more impressive way to draw your attention to the phone than a single LED light.

All of this shows meticulous attention to detail, and the whole phone feels solidly put together as well - it’s one of thinnest phones out there (measuring 0.29”, or 7.5mm), and it’s pleasingly lightweight. The OneTouch Idol Alpha is sized to fit well in most pockets and, while it’s not perfectly well suited for single-handed use, it feels compact enough. Altogether, this is clearly a device for those who value a phone that is stylish and unlike any other, but without being over-the-top kitsch.

The Idol Alpha uses capacitive navigation keys, but weirdly, the buttons are not marked – instead, you can see the button labels on the translucent plastic strip below the actual buttons. You get used to it quickly, but it's just a weird decision that is hard to justify in any meaningful way.

Display

The 4.7-inch 720p display has colors that look good, but not perfect. Reflections make it hard to read outdoors.

The Idol Alpha comes with a 4.7-inch IPS LCD display with a resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels, translating into a pixel density of the quite reasonable 312ppi. The display definitely does not lack much in terms of sharpness, and it’s hard to notice any pixelization at all, but if you compare it against, say, a 1080p display of a similar size, you’d notice that making out smaller fonts is a bit harder on the display of the Idol Alpha.

In terms of colors, the screen is not bad at all. Color temperature is excellent at 6750K, so white are very good, not blueish. Gamma is also excellent at 2.24. However, colors are somewhat oversaturated and not correct – they are poppy but not natural, as you can see in our color charts below, resulting in average color error (delta E) of 6.21, which is definitely not true to life image. If you are not color purist though, the screen looks pretty good!

The Idol Alpha screen can get reasonably bright to 486 nits, and that’s hugely important for comfortable outdoor viewing. However, at the same time, it’s also very reflective, so overall, outdoors, you’d need to stare with a bit of extra effort to be able to read what’s on the display. In addition, we should note that the screen cannot get dim enough for comfortable reading at night - it’s lowest brightness is still too high at 76 nits, a level that will disturb your eyes if you use it in a dark environment.

Interface and Functionality

It’s disappointing to see the antiquated Android 4.2 Jelly Bean on a new smartphone. Alcatel’s custom skin on top of it looks different in a good way.

The Idol Alpha ships with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, and needless to say, we would have liked to see a much newer version of Google’s operating system on board. Alcatel is using its own custom skin on top of Android, to customize its looks, but most of the customizations are skin deep, focusing on changing the icon set and lock screen, rather than introducing new features. That’s not a bad thing - we like Alcatel’s simple and light skin that does not hog down Android, and yet manages to stand out with generally likable, flat and modern icons. If we had to be picky, we’d say, though, that inside menus, the iconography is a bit too minimalist and looking too monotonous for our taste.

In terms of apps, the Idol Alpha comes with the usual suite of Google applications including Chrome, Gmail, Drive, and so on. Alcatel has added a few nifty apps on top of that - a weather app, a custom browser, FM radio, a compass, torch, and a file manager. It has also bundled in quite a few third-party apps, the most notable of them being the Kingsoft Office package. Moreover, there are a few “ONE TOUCH”-branded applications as well that allow you to backup your phone and get curated apps. Lastly, the built-in Screen share application makes it easier to share what’s on your phone to a larger screen.

Basic functionality is covered with the usual richness of the Android operating system, with support for swipe navigation between your contact and call log. Visually, though, the phone app features minimalist icons that look a bit too repetitive.

The phone ships with two apps for text messaging - one by Alcatel, and Google’s Hangouts. Both get the job done well, but Hangouts is the one with much tighter integration with Google services, and if you use them, it’s the better fit. The typing experience is fairly good on the Idol Alpha - it ships with the Touchpal keyboard that gets the job done, but you can also install a another keyboard like Google’s one or, say, SwiftKey.

Processor and Memory

Powered by a quad-core MediaTek chip, the Idol Alpha runs fine for most daily tasks, but it struggles with heavier apps and games.

The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha is a mid-range device, and you can best tell by what’s under the hood. Instead of a roaring Snapdragon chip, the Idol Alpha runs on a more modest and cheaper MediaTek system chip. It’s a quad-core chip running at up to 1.2GHz that gets the job done well, without much of a stutter for casual apps and games.

In particular, we’re looking at MediaTek’s most popular MT6589 piece of silicon, with four CPU cores based on Cortex A7, and manufactured on the 28nm node.

On the gaming side of things, you have the PowerVR SGX544 graphics processing chip running at up to 286MHz. We managed to play basic games with no slowdown, while more demanding games do run on the device, but frame-rate is lower and gameplay is skippy and not very enjoyable.

The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha arrives with 16GB of built-in storage that is not expandable as there’s simply no microSD card slot on the phone. Out of these 16 gigs, 13.3GB are actually available to the end user.

Browser

Internet and Connectivity

There is no 4G LTE connectivity here. The phone also slows down when you open a few tabs.

You can surf the web via one of the two built-in browsers on the Idol Alpha - Chrome and Alcatel’s custom solution. Chrome seems a bit better optimized for the not-so-fast silicon of Alcatel’s phone, while the company’s own solution is a bit slower, especially when dealing with more than two tabs. Generally, surfing the web is not as lag-free as we would have liked, as you see a noticeable drop in framerate when switching between tabs, and even when scrolling and zooming around.

In terms of connectivity, the Idol Alpha does NOT support 4G LTE connectivity. You have HSPA mobile data, along with the usual set of connectivity options including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and GPS, but there is no NFC.

Camera

The 13-megapixel camera shoots below-average images as colors are often misjudged. In video, though, the Idol Alpha does better with its quick auto-focus.

The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha features a 13-megapixel main auto-focus camera with a single LED flash and a 1.3-megapixel front shooter.

The camera app opens fairly quickly and is generally clutter-free and easy to use, while at the same time keeping manual options at hand. Just tap on the settings key on the left inside the app, and you get an easily accessible vertically scrolling list of switches and toggles, that allows you to take the shooter on a nearly fully manual ride. The camera can also capture HDR images, but the processing is painstakingly slow.

Images from the 13-megapixel camera on the Idol Alpha, however, disappoint. The shots are too inconsistent, as the camera often times gets the colors totally wrong, ruining images with an apparent yellowish or greenish cast. Not always, though - indoors, most of the time, it gets colors right, but outdoors such an unpredictable inconsistency is definitely troubling. Detail level is decent at the center of the images, but is blurred on the side of the pictures, giving them a soft look.

Indoors, images start getting noticeably grainy. With the flash off, colors are mostly okay, but because of the high-levels of noise, images are best used in smaller sizes. With the flash on, the scene is lit up well enough, and while you do have a bluish overcast, the images are usable.

The front camera is capable of snapping decent selfies, and provides sufficient detail for video calls.




Switching over to video, you can record 1080p footage at 30 frames per second, and the recordings look fairly smooth and very detailed, not bad at all. And we’re actually impressed with how fast the Idol Alpha’s auto-focus system works - it’s capable of switching between objects from the foreground and background in a snap. Color is rich and as you move the phone around, it also quickly adjusts its exposure, which is a plus. In terms of sound recording quality, the phone is not exceptional in any way, but it does a more than decent job capturing clear and pleasing audio.

Multimedia

The 4.7” display of the Idol Alpha in concert with its great codec support, makes for a good media experience. The quiet loudspeaker, though, is a disappointment.

With a decently large, 4.7-inch display, the Idol Alpha is perfectly fit to entertain you on the go. Its video player is perfectly prepared for the task as it plays back all common video formats and codecs we threw at it at even 1080p resolution.

For music, you have a pretty barebones custom player by Alcatel, and Google Play music on board. Both get the job done, classifying your music by songs, artists, albums and genres, and both display large, impressive album art.

What we’re not so impressed with is the sound quality via the single loudspeaker located on the back of the phone. Its quality is fine for a smartphone, but it’s just too quiet.

Call Quality

Call quality is decent on both ends of the line, and we encountered no huge issues. Still, however, the voice quality leaves room for improvement. Voices in the earpiece, for once, sound audibly distorted, coming through with digital noise on the side. Our callers are much happier with how we sound on the other end of the line - clean and natural - but they also wished us to sound a little louder.

Battery life

The Idol Alpha sports a 2000mAh battery, an allowance that definitely seems scarce when compared to other similarly sized phones. Official figures show that the phone lasts a fairly good 10 hours in 3G talk time, 15 days on stand-by. However,

what do those numbers mean in real life? Our experience shows that you can hardly get more than one day on a single charge, and under heavier use you’d have to recharge during the day as well.

Conclusion

You won’t believe it, but the OneTouch Idol Alpha, a device with 4.7” 720p display and a MediaTek system chip, costs more than the Samsung Galaxy S4! The off-contract price of the Galaxy S4 stands at around $450 (€349), while the Idol Alpha currently sells for over $500 (€379).

Usually, we’d be looking at similar devices when pointing out the alternatives of a handset, but with the Idol Alpha’s price, practically all other phones in its price range have better specs like sharper 1080p display, better camera, and powerful processor. Speaking of alternatives, you can get the afore-mentioned Galaxy S4, or the LG G2 for a similar price. Both are much better all-around phones!

All in all, we do like the OneTouch Idol Alpha for its style, and it would have been an interesting device, if it was priced right. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. At its current ludicrous price, it simply makes no sense to buy it over other, much better equipped phones.