If you think the top-priced smartphones are out of your range, check out the new Alcatel One Touch Idol X, available at www.bell.ca with no down payment and a mid-level two-year plan. It only costs $250 outright to buy with no plan. Its sibling the 4.3 – inch Alcatel Onetouch Idol Mini, is also free with two year plan or $149 outright.
Watch the video above: Steve Makris talks about phones made in China and designed by the Chinese
It feels and looks like any top tier Android smartphone with similar features. Fast processor, sharp 5-inch screen, 13 megapixel camera, 1080P video and a gorgeous 1080 x 1920 IPS (wide angle view) display, as sharp as the best phones. It is the thinnest phone around at 6.9 mm compared to the iPhone 5S at 7.6 mm and weighs 130 grams.
What makes it special is the thin bezel, leaving more screen in a compact design making it a great one-hand use phone, even for small hands.
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It has gestures like turning it face down to silence calls and alarms while a hand shake switches songs. It’s only 8 GB internal but has a micro SD slot for up to 32 GB more memory. The smart spring covers for SD and micro SD cards make it easy to access, require no pins…finally!
It works well with Bell’s more than 30 live and 14 on demand TV channels the go, with the Bell TV app. If you have Bell TV service at home, you can take your programming with you and get access to over 100 channels. It can play media on DLNA capable flat-panels TV’s.
It has a good selection of settings, sequential image, face tracking, panorama, auto retouching and more.
What doesn’t it have for such a great price? It’s not LTE compatible so you won’t get the fastest Internet experience but good enough for most things you do. The phone’s 13 megapixel camera looks great in most scenes, but is subject to more side light flare and lower contrast photos than pricier cameras, presumably the price to pay for squeezing a camera is such a thin phone. The video, at its highest 1080p setting is shaky if you move too fast…even while viewing during still shooting is not as smooth as pricier cameras. The screen response is a bit sluggish, not that you would know if you current phone is several years old. The finish is average with noticeable ripples on the side of the phone, but the overall physical appearance and feel of the large screen phone impresses.
So, it’s the little stuff that won’t measure up to a Galaxy Note 3, S4 or iPhone 5S or BlackBerry Z10, but for the price it’s a better phone than other “starter” smartphones with smaller screens. And it’s still $100 cheaper than the Google Nexus 5, although the latter LG based phone is good as the big players in every respect. It’s all on what price range you feel comfortable with.
The Alcatel One Touch is part of TCL Communications www.tclcom.com/ based in Shenzhen, China, a large publicly traded company on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The smartly designed phone arrived in Canada recently and is a sign of more affordable phones heading this way from Asian manufacturers.
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