Choosing a new smartphone has never been harder than it is right now, with so many companies offering a lot of great products it can be a long process to pick the right phone for the right price. That process just became a little harder with the introduction of a new player in the Canadian cell phone market. The company is Alcatel, and they are offering a wide variety of phones.
The phone we’re writing about today is the Idol X+, part of their OneTouch line (we also reviewed their OneTouch Pop 8 tablet recently).
Alcatel is the latest player to enter the Canadian digital device market, offering smartphones and tablets, the company offers great products with an emphasis on affordability. The phone we reviewed, Alcatel OneTouch Idol X+, is priced at a very reasonable $350 CAD if bought outright with Telus or $300 with Koodo no contract plan.
The Idol X+ is a sleek looking phone; our review unit came in black with a gloss black back. The phone is also offered with a matte black back and a white version. The phone comes with brushed aluminum frame on the sides, giving it a premium look. It also has a nice weight in the hand. It comes with a slot for a micro SIM card and a micro SD card. According to the website, the Idol X+ comes with JBL earphone, however, I could not find them in the box our phone came in.
The Alcatel Idol X+ comes in a compact package that’s not too big or too small; it’s about the same size as a regular iPhone 6. The phone measures 140.4mm x 69.1mm x 8.1mm and weighs 125 grams. The size feels good in the hand and is still useful to browse apps or watch short video clips. The screen measures 5” with a very thin bezel, maximizing the viewing area. The screen is Corning Gorilla glass and has a display of 1080 x 1920 pixels.
The OneTouch Idol X+ is powered by a Media Tek MT6592 octa-core 2 GHz processor and runs on Android Jelly Bean 4.2 operating system. The phone comes with 2 GB of RAM and 16 or 32 GB of storage. Unfortunately, the OS is not the latest offering from Android, so that is something you might want to look out for if you’re into that sort of a thing. Personally for me, the phone worked fine and I don’t really use my phone for things other than making calls, texting, and playing the odd game. The phone performs well for doing regular tasks and flipping pages on the phone is very fast and crisp. While using the chrome browser to view websites, I didn’t find any lags when I was browsing webpages quickly.
The Idol X+ comes with a pair of cameras, the front one is a 2.0 megapixel unit and the rear one is a 13.1 MP unit. The rear camera is very good for shooting pictures in natural light, I took the photo below in my home made light box, I think it turned out pretty good. Taking pictures of moving objects is a little harder, as they turn out to be fuzzy most of the time.
Overall, I think the Alcatel OneTouch Idol X+ is a pretty good phone for the price, it has a pretty attractive design that looks and feels high quality. I like the performance of the phone for doing for doing regular tasks and the camera is very good. For more information, check out alcatelonetouch.com.
