Buying a $150 Phone - Alcatel 3V Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,611 words · ~8 min read
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I've actually been wanting to familiarize myself with the current crop
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of budget smartphones for a while. So,
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when Alcatel reached out offering to send over a unit of their 3V, a phone so
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basic that it boasts US warranty as one
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of its noteworthy features. I couldn't resist, especially when I noticed that
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this thing also has a 2160x
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1080 18x9 aspect ratio display and costs
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only 150 bucks.
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Let's start with some of the things that cheed me off about the 3V before I'd
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even managed to get any apps installed on it. Number one, the glass. Now, I
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wasn't expecting Corning glass or anything, but over the entire phone,
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both front and back, it is a lot more
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effort than I'm accustomed to to drag my finger across the glass. Now, on the
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back, it's not actually a big deal. In fact, I think other manufacturers uh
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here's a Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S could learn a thing or two about making their uh super
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shiny phones a little bit less slippery to hold onto. But on the front, the
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sticky feeling glass has got to be the single cheapest feeling thing about this
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phone. And as an added bonus, it's
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actually harder to clean smears off of it, too. So, you'll spend more time kind
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of scrubbing away at it with your shirt compared to a Gorilla Glass phone with a
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better coating. Number two, the haptic
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motor on this thing is one of the worst that I've felt in a long time. Even
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ignoring the Taptic Engine, Apple's fantastic haptic motor that handles 3D
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touch. It is like, oh, can you guys hear that?
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It's like going back in time to when phones could vibrate themselves off of a
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table when they were ringing. And if I type too fast with the haptic feedback
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enabled, it actually sounds like the phone is going to fall apart. And number
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three, it has a USB microB port.
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I mean, to be clear, that is not necessarily a huge functional
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disadvantage. Many modern phones have type-C ports, but they still connect at
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USB 2 speeds anyway, and they leave out a lot of the really handy functionality
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that is possible with a type-C port, uh,
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like outputting a DisplayPort signal. It's just more fragile, which is an
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issue that's made worse by the 3V's lack of any, you know, fancy pants modern
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features like wireless charging. All right, after all that though, my
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impressions started getting a lot better. The 3V is lightweight, which for
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some people might contribute to the cheap feel, but I didn't really mind it.
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And the buttons, check this out.
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Okay, you can't really hear it, but they feel pretty clicky without being too
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hard to press. Also, I noticed that they included Swift Key keyboard, which I
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love, and not much else. You'll find
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icons for Netflix and Facebook out of the box, but considering that I and
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probably most people would have downloaded those anyway, I don't really
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consider that to be bloat. Even the performance deficiencies aren't really
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visible in the traditional places. Like it used to be that you could tell a
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quality unit from a basic one just by swiping left or right as it were. And
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everything from navigating between the desktops to uh opening up folders
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actually happens pretty smoothly. Even the app launch times, mind you, we're
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talking about uh web browsers and utilities here, not necessarily games,
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weren't noticeably bad.
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But the MediaTek 8735A
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quad core processor, which has four Cortex A53 cores at its heart, really
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shows its uh well,
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it shows its something. I I wanted to say age, but was this thing even fast
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when it was current? Anyway, in certain tasks, like auto rotating on even a
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mostly text web page or, and this one's
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actually much more egregious, zooming in on a picture that you've taken to admire
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your handiwork. Oh. Oh. Oh, look at that. This thing
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feels noticeably
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seven or eight years ago. On that note though, admiring your
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handiwork, the screen is far from terrible. It's 6 in 2160x 1080. Yes, the
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fancy new 18x9 aspect ratio. And the Alcatel website even has a prominent
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spot on it for the logo of their parent company, TCL, whose $400 budget TV we
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actually really liked in our recent review, along with some messaging about
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how they relied on TCL's screen expertise in order to develop the 3V's
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display. Now, it doesn't go as dark or
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as bright, so its contrast compared to some flagship tier phones, especially
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ones with OLED displays, is not that
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impressive. But it's got a non- vivid mode, which I
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really appreciate seeing. And for the vast majority of users in day-to-day
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applications, it is unlikely to be a problem unless you want to use it in
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direct sunlight outside or something along those lines
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or if you want to use it to watch movies on Netflix. So, I fired up the beginning
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scene of Thor Ragnarok, which
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speakers are on. Sorry. Sorry. Also, this isn't the beginning scene.
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And it looks so dark and so low contrast and
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even low res that I was kind of taken it
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back and I was prompted to send an email to Netflix and they haven't gotten back
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to me. But as far as I can tell, the low
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resess of it anyway seems to have to do
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with the display not being HDR certified. So, when I watch this movie
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side by side with the Galaxy S9 Plus,
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the S9, it looks so much better that
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even through our camera, then through your screen at home, you should be able
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to pretty easily see the differences in the fine details here. So, I can't
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figure out why it is that HDR certification, which is more of a
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contrast and color thing, is affecting the resolution they're serving, but it's
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something that I've repeated on other phones as well.
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Other things are handled reasonably well though. So aspect ratio controls are
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done either through a big list in the settings menu or and this is kind of
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cool on the fly app by app with this
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little button right here. So if you run into a compatibility issue with the
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wider or taller aspect ratio display, you can easily fix it just by clicking
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that button. And in general actually the software is not awful. Like it's not
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stock Android, but whether it was a conscious decision or a costsaving one,
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the Android 8.0 Oreo on this thing is pretty bare, but pretty functional. It's
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definitely a brighter point than the camera, which is far from the worst that
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I've ever seen, even on a value device. But that brighter joke, brighter point,
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was because it constantly underexposes
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my shots. And this is true of both stills and videos. Anyway, I mean, it's
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usable in lots of light and it's certainly better for capturing the
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moment than absolutely nothing. And I always appreciate a double click to
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quick launch the camera gesture. But naturally, it lacks fancy features like
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image stabilization. So, even though I went out of my way to grab a more modest
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competitor for this thing, the Honor 10, rather than like a flagship iPhone 10 or
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something, it's clearly and noticeably inferior. But inferior doesn't mean
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complete garbage. Its charging is a little bit slow, but the 3,000 mAh
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battery combined with the low-end hardware means that over a day will be
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easy to achieve for most people, and NFC is missing. But dualband Wi-Fi, which is
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far more important in my opinion, and used to be left out of value phones like
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this, is present. Now, it's only got 16 gigs of storage on the $150 model, which
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means that you won't be installing a ton of heavy apps like games, but it's got
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micro SD expansion, so as long as you don't load up tons of apps, at least you
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can store your Plex or your Netflix downloads somewhere rather than having
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the phone fill up all the time and start behaving really weirdly like my
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mother-in-law's old 8 gig phone.
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I think we're pretty close to the end here. Let's see. Um, the speaker is
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pretty quiet, which affects speaker phone calls and watching movies.
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But Cooler Master appears to have kicked off a giant OEM love fest,
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but it does have a headphone jack, so there's that. And I would be floored if
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you get a ton of software updates. But this was enlightening for me. I'm
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actually really impressed at how much phone you can get for 150 bucks, even if
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I like wouldn't want to switch to it. Like I personally I would probably go
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for a contract subsidy instead, but that
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is not an option for everyone. So,
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