I've actually been wanting to familiarize myself with the current crop
of budget smartphones for a while. So,
when Alcatel reached out offering to send over a unit of their 3V, a phone so
basic that it boasts US warranty as one
of its noteworthy features. I couldn't resist, especially when I noticed that
this thing also has a 2160x
1080 18x9 aspect ratio display and costs
only 150 bucks.
Let's start with some of the things that cheed me off about the 3V before I'd
even managed to get any apps installed on it. Number one, the glass. Now, I
wasn't expecting Corning glass or anything, but over the entire phone,
both front and back, it is a lot more
effort than I'm accustomed to to drag my finger across the glass. Now, on the
back, it's not actually a big deal. In fact, I think other manufacturers uh
here's a Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S could learn a thing or two about making their uh super
shiny phones a little bit less slippery to hold onto. But on the front, the
sticky feeling glass has got to be the single cheapest feeling thing about this
phone. And as an added bonus, it's
actually harder to clean smears off of it, too. So, you'll spend more time kind
of scrubbing away at it with your shirt compared to a Gorilla Glass phone with a
better coating. Number two, the haptic
motor on this thing is one of the worst that I've felt in a long time. Even
ignoring the Taptic Engine, Apple's fantastic haptic motor that handles 3D
touch. It is like, oh, can you guys hear that?
It's like going back in time to when phones could vibrate themselves off of a
table when they were ringing. And if I type too fast with the haptic feedback
enabled, it actually sounds like the phone is going to fall apart. And number
three, it has a USB microB port.
I mean, to be clear, that is not necessarily a huge functional
disadvantage. Many modern phones have type-C ports, but they still connect at
USB 2 speeds anyway, and they leave out a lot of the really handy functionality
that is possible with a type-C port, uh,
like outputting a DisplayPort signal. It's just more fragile, which is an
issue that's made worse by the 3V's lack of any, you know, fancy pants modern
features like wireless charging. All right, after all that though, my
impressions started getting a lot better. The 3V is lightweight, which for
some people might contribute to the cheap feel, but I didn't really mind it.
And the buttons, check this out.
Okay, you can't really hear it, but they feel pretty clicky without being too
hard to press. Also, I noticed that they included Swift Key keyboard, which I
love, and not much else. You'll find
icons for Netflix and Facebook out of the box, but considering that I and
probably most people would have downloaded those anyway, I don't really
consider that to be bloat. Even the performance deficiencies aren't really
visible in the traditional places. Like it used to be that you could tell a
quality unit from a basic one just by swiping left or right as it were. And
everything from navigating between the desktops to uh opening up folders
actually happens pretty smoothly. Even the app launch times, mind you, we're
talking about uh web browsers and utilities here, not necessarily games,
weren't noticeably bad.
But the MediaTek 8735A
quad core processor, which has four Cortex A53 cores at its heart, really
shows its uh well,
it shows its something. I I wanted to say age, but was this thing even fast
when it was current? Anyway, in certain tasks, like auto rotating on even a
mostly text web page or, and this one's
actually much more egregious, zooming in on a picture that you've taken to admire
your handiwork. Oh. Oh. Oh, look at that. This thing
feels noticeably
seven or eight years ago. On that note though, admiring your
handiwork, the screen is far from terrible. It's 6 in 2160x 1080. Yes, the
fancy new 18x9 aspect ratio. And the Alcatel website even has a prominent
spot on it for the logo of their parent company, TCL, whose $400 budget TV we
actually really liked in our recent review, along with some messaging about
how they relied on TCL's screen expertise in order to develop the 3V's
display. Now, it doesn't go as dark or
as bright, so its contrast compared to some flagship tier phones, especially
ones with OLED displays, is not that
impressive. But it's got a non- vivid mode, which I
really appreciate seeing. And for the vast majority of users in day-to-day
applications, it is unlikely to be a problem unless you want to use it in
direct sunlight outside or something along those lines
or if you want to use it to watch movies on Netflix. So, I fired up the beginning
scene of Thor Ragnarok, which
speakers are on. Sorry. Sorry. Also, this isn't the beginning scene.
And it looks so dark and so low contrast and
even low res that I was kind of taken it
back and I was prompted to send an email to Netflix and they haven't gotten back
to me. But as far as I can tell, the low
resess of it anyway seems to have to do
with the display not being HDR certified. So, when I watch this movie
side by side with the Galaxy S9 Plus,
the S9, it looks so much better that
even through our camera, then through your screen at home, you should be able
to pretty easily see the differences in the fine details here. So, I can't
figure out why it is that HDR certification, which is more of a
contrast and color thing, is affecting the resolution they're serving, but it's
something that I've repeated on other phones as well.
Other things are handled reasonably well though. So aspect ratio controls are
done either through a big list in the settings menu or and this is kind of
cool on the fly app by app with this
little button right here. So if you run into a compatibility issue with the
wider or taller aspect ratio display, you can easily fix it just by clicking
that button. And in general actually the software is not awful. Like it's not
stock Android, but whether it was a conscious decision or a costsaving one,
the Android 8.0 Oreo on this thing is pretty bare, but pretty functional. It's
definitely a brighter point than the camera, which is far from the worst that
I've ever seen, even on a value device. But that brighter joke, brighter point,
was because it constantly underexposes
my shots. And this is true of both stills and videos. Anyway, I mean, it's
usable in lots of light and it's certainly better for capturing the
moment than absolutely nothing. And I always appreciate a double click to
quick launch the camera gesture. But naturally, it lacks fancy features like
image stabilization. So, even though I went out of my way to grab a more modest
competitor for this thing, the Honor 10, rather than like a flagship iPhone 10 or
something, it's clearly and noticeably inferior. But inferior doesn't mean
complete garbage. Its charging is a little bit slow, but the 3,000 mAh
battery combined with the low-end hardware means that over a day will be
easy to achieve for most people, and NFC is missing. But dualband Wi-Fi, which is
far more important in my opinion, and used to be left out of value phones like
this, is present. Now, it's only got 16 gigs of storage on the $150 model, which
means that you won't be installing a ton of heavy apps like games, but it's got
micro SD expansion, so as long as you don't load up tons of apps, at least you
can store your Plex or your Netflix downloads somewhere rather than having
the phone fill up all the time and start behaving really weirdly like my
mother-in-law's old 8 gig phone.
I think we're pretty close to the end here. Let's see. Um, the speaker is
pretty quiet, which affects speaker phone calls and watching movies.
But Cooler Master appears to have kicked off a giant OEM love fest,
but it does have a headphone jack, so there's that. And I would be floored if
you get a ton of software updates. But this was enlightening for me. I'm
actually really impressed at how much phone you can get for 150 bucks, even if
I like wouldn't want to switch to it. Like I personally I would probably go
for a contract subsidy instead, but that
is not an option for everyone. So,
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