Alcatel One Touch Idol X Review

Introduction

Alcatel is back to cooking Android phones with a vengeance, and its One Touch Idol X is shaped to be one of the most affordable and well-equipped Full HD 5-inchers, not to mention the dual SIM option it offers.

From this season's flagship specs list Alcatel skimped only on the relatively weak MediaTek processor, while the rest are top-shelf ingredients – big Full HD display, 2 GB of RAM, 13 MP camera - all wrapped up in a slim and light body. This fine and dandy on paper, but are we getting a high-end experience for a mid-range price in reality? Read on to find out...

Design

We mentioned thin and light, and that's the exact first impression you get with the Idol X in your hand. Its 0.27” (6.9mm) make it one of the slimmest smartphones around, and at 4.23 oz (120 g), it is also one of the lightest.

If you think this feat has been achieved by an all-plastic build, Alcatel has a surprise in store for you – the back cover is indeed plastic, but the phone's frame is made of titanium alloy, allowing for structural rigidity yet an extremely light package. That metal alloy wraps the phone around the sides, interrupted only with slim cutouts for the ports and buttons. We liked how the titanium rim is also slightly elevated above the front, so the recessed screen part is protected when lying face-down on a flat surface. On the minus side, that means dust and pocket lint gets trapped towards the end really easily instead of being simply wiped out. The polycarbonate back comes in black, red or yellow, and doesn't feel too cheap, though a soft-touch plastic would have been a more premium match for the chassis.

The phone is rather narrow for a 5-incher, at 2.66” (67.5mm), due to what Alcatel calls “0 bezel”, which is actually 2.4mm on the left and the right. That's one of the best achievements around, even thinner than the 2.65mm side bezel of the LG G2, explaining why the elongated design of the Idol X is so easy to operate with one hand compared to most other big-screen phones. To put things in perspective, the Idol X is taller, but thinner, lighter and more narrow than both the Galaxy S4 and LG G2. Granted, the top and bottom bezels are fairly wide, but it's the side ones and the overall width that matter in one-handed operation.

Our only gripe with the design decisions around Alcatel's new flagship is the power/lock key placed at the top, making it a literal stretch to press on such a tall handset. Both the lock key up top, and the volume rocker on the right, however, are easy to feel and press, with decent tactile feedback. The sides also house two card slots - in our dual SIM version they are both for the carrier micro SIM cards, whereas with the single SIM one you get a SIM slot and a microSD one. Yep, since we have an unibody phone, that means you don't get storage expansion with the dual SIM variant of the Idol X, though it comes with 16 GB of internal memory – double the amount of the single SIM handset - to compensate somewhat.

The protective flaps that cover those two card slots on both sides come with unorthodox design. They are completely flush with the metal rim around the phone, with only a small “pimple” protruding at their upper parts. When you drag it with your nail/fingertip, the flap opens up, so you can insert the SIM or memory card, then you can slap it back down, and a tiny magnet at the other end locks it in place, keeping it flush with the side surface and almost invisible. The problem part here is actually inserting the SIM card, as the instruction drawing on the flaps is hardly visible, and hard to read correctly. Even when you find the correct position for the card to go in, you need to push it really deep until it clicks into place – a task that is very hard with trimmed fingernails, for instance.

There are three capacitive navigational keys beneath the display, which are not the most responsive we've tried, but do the job. They are, thankfully, backlit, and the white light sipping through matches the small LED notification dot next to the earpiece slit that lets you know the phone is charging, or informs you of missed events, like calls and messages. There is also a 2 MP front camera up there, as well as an ambient light sensor which works like a charm, dimming the display gradually when the light goes down, or blasting it up outdoors.

Display

The 5” 1080x1920 pixels panel is of the laminated IPS-LCD variety, meaning a tight, bright, low-reflection package, integrating the touch layer into the display itself. Its protection is guaranteed by the durable Asahi Dragontrail glass, which is similar to Corning's Gorilla Glass franchise, and the brand that Alcatel works with on all of its recent phones.

With 441ppi pixel density, the screen is a piece of beauty, showing no icon or text jaggies, even if you explore it up close and personal. Its color saturation seems a bit subdued and the the tones themselves a bit on the warm side, but nothing out of the range for one very good smartphone display.

The screen is very bright and with good reflection coating, meaning you won't have troubles viewing it outside, even under direct sunlight. Brightness and color shift slightly at extreme viewing angles, but, again, nothing out of the norms for a good IPS-LCD screen, so overall the Idol X is graced with one excellent 5” Full HD panel.

Interface and functionality

Alcatel supplies a tidy OneTouch Android interface overlay on top of 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. Its general looks are not far from the stock experience, with the lock screen, contacts, wallpaper and notification bar graphics closely matching it. The lock screen shows date, time and weather or calendar, and you can swipe back and forth between the two without unlocking.

The icons, however, are big, rounded and colorful, begging to be pressed. There is no app drawer icon, so if you want to call it, you'd have to flick up from the bottom of the display. The most used apps have shortcuts placed directly on the home screens by default, and the rest neatly arranged into categorized Google Services, Productivity, Assistance, Tools and Games folders there. Those folders are heavily populated with preinstalled stuff – from a Torch app, through two offices – QuickOffice and KingSoft - to a few Gameloft titles. Alcatel also throws in a few pretty handpicked widgets for your weather, contacts and calendar duties, which look much better than the stock ones, as well as the excellent SwiftKey keyboard option.

The dock contains four icon shortcuts, which can be rearranged and replaced to your heart's desire, and that about sums up the interface customizations Alcatel has peppered on. Since we have a dual SIM device, the company has ensured a SIM management app is present as well, which lets you name and color your two connections as you please, and set roaming preferences and restrictions for them.

Processor and memory

The weakest spot of the One Touch Idol X is its chipset – the 1.5 GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6589+ processor is a frugal Cortex-A7 work, and not up to par with even the current low-end Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, but something had to give to arrive at the phone's price. As you can see from the benchmarks below, you won't have blistering performance while working the interface, and heavy 3D games will be playable only with patience.

Thankfully, Alcatel has placed 2 GB of RAM in the handset, aiding multitasking and loading times. 8 GB of internal memory plus a microSD slot are present on the Idol X version with one SIM card, whereas our dual SIM version doesn't leave place for a memory card, but comes with 16 GB of storage, of which 12.75 GB are user-available out of the box.

Internet and connectivity

The stock browser on the handset renders pages pretty fast, and we had no issues with choppy scrolling or laggy panning. Despite the relatively weak chipset, the browser is primed to render the pages in real time while zooming in and out, and the task is handled remarkably well, with barely a blur while zooming or panning. In addition, all text content looks pretty and legible on such high pixel density even when zoomed out, while text reflow works like a charm, snapping the right columns into the screen width immediately.

There's little skimping on connectivity options with Alcatel's finest – the Idol X supports 42 Mbps HSPA+ download speeds and HD voice, if your European/Asian carrier can supply the goods, of course, as those are the regions that the phone is aimed at. The two SIM cards can't hook up simultaneously on such speeds, but you can gobble fast data on one, while talking with the other. The cards are also hot-swappable, meaning you don't have to reboot the handset when inserting a new SIM card, or taking one out – the handset just reloads the launcher, asks for your PIN if you cards have one, and that's that.

Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, A-GPS, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA and FM radio round up the other connectivity options, with about the only thing missing being NFC.

Alcatel also offers a branded dongle that plugs into the HDMI port of your TV, and you can stream videos and other media wirelessly from your Idol X to the TV – yes, it supports Full HD MKV files, too.

Camera

The 13 MP shooter on the back of the Idol X is paired with an LED flash, and we get a 2 MP camera at the front with something Alcatel calls Emotishots, which takes four slow successive photos of your expression, giving you the time to adjust for the perfect selfie to rival Miley Cyrus. There is also a Beauty Face option with the Full HD front-facing cam, that smooths out skin tones and removes blemishes.

The camera app interface is very intuitive, and with a transparent background so you can always follow the frame in front of your lens. There are HDR, Panorama, 360, Night and Sports shooting modes, while from the more advanced settings only ISO (up to 1600) and exposure adjustment sliders are present. There aren't any color effects to apply if you are into those, so you'd have to probe the Play Store for a 3rd party app.

The pictures come out with appealing, oversaturated colors. There aren't any glaring white balance or exposure calculation issues, so overall the phone takes pretty good photos when there's enough light to shine on the scene. However, the amount of detail is somewhat lower than what we'd expect from a 13 MP shooter.

Alcatel says that the “Super Macro” lens keep objects sharp from as close as 5cm (2”) but in reality we got sharp results from about 10cm (4”), which is still a quite decent result.

When it gets dark the photos come out rather noisy and a tad blurry, though nothing out of the ordinary for a phone camera, and we'd recommend to turn on the Night mode for better low-light results.




Video gets captured with Full HD 1080p resolution and fluid 30fps. It exhibits the same oversaturation as the stills, making the footage look more vivid than it actually is. Exposure adjustments while panning around happen quickly, and the handset supports continuous autofocus, though shifting the focus back and forth between a close object and the background happens within two or three seconds sometimes.

Multimedia

The gallery sports grid thumbnail view, and offers a rich variety of photo enhancement and editing options built into the interface. You can share its content through no less than 13 different services, including Evernote and OfficeSuite's Wi-Fi Direct option.

Music playback is categorized by artists, albums, genres and playlists in the player interface, and there are a bunch of equalizer presets to apply. The “Bass Boost” and faux surround “3D Sound” options are only available to you when you plug in the headset. We get a pretty decent loudspeaker with the Idol X, despite the slim body, which is strong and sounds relatively clean.

Video playback support is stellar, with DivX/Xvid/MKV files all playing without a hitch in up to 1080p resolutions. The player itself is rather barebone, though, with just an extra loop function, so we'd recommend to quickly pawn off the video footage playback to 3rd party Play Store apps.

Call quality

The Idol X sports a very good earpiece, with clean and strong sound coming out, without any distortions even at the highest volume. The two noise-canceling microphones weed out the surrounding noise very well, and picked our voice loud and clear to relay to the other side, with only intermittent static noises present.

Battery

The sealed 2000 mAh unit capacity is nothing to write home about in this day and age, but Alcatel cites 12 hours of talk time with it in 3G mode, which is a number above the average. Standby is less than typical, though, at about 10 days, since the handset has to maintain two network connections at once. Nevertheless, we didn't notice any unusual overnight drain with the Idol X, and it easily got us through the day with our typical workload, leaving some juice for the night still.

Conclusion

Alcatel has managed to produce an excellent handset with the One Touch Idol X – it is the thinnest, lightest and one of the cheapest 5” handsets with Full HD displays, which are all the rage these days.

With the Idol X you get a luminant 1080 x1920 pixel display, fine photos and videos, and a good call quality, which is pretty important for a dual SIM handset. All of this is wrapped up in a compact and elegant package that eases one-handed operation.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a more affordable Full HD 5-incher with about the only so-so point being the relatively weak MedaiTek chipset. Barring the dual SIM version of the HTC One for China, the Idol X is also the most equipped dual SIM phone out there, and it will definitely ring you cheaper than HTC's flagship.

Even the single SIM version is worth its about $350 asking price, while with a dual SIM option the phone becomes unstoppable, one of the best Android values for the money. The dual SIM Oppo R819 is a prime competitor for a similar price, but it is about as big as the Idol X, yet with a smaller display and lower resolution.

Software version: 4.2.2-01001