Buying a $150 Phone - Alcatel 3V Review By Linus Tech Tips

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 2160 by 1080 18 by 9 aspect, ratio display and costs. Only a hundred and fifty bucks memory express is hosting a massive 22nd anniversary sale from July 20th to July, 22nd, 2018, and they're going to have tons of deals check it out at the link below and stay tuned to later in this video to hear more, let's start with some of the things that cheesed 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 drag my finger across the glass now on the back. It's not actually a big deal, in fact, I think other manufacturers, here's a whammy mix 2s, could learn a thing or two about making their super shiny phones a little less slippery to hold on to. But on the front the sticky feeling glass has got to be the single, the 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 worse that I've felt in a long time, even ignoring the tactic engine. Apples, fantastic haptic motor that handles 3d touch it is like. Can you guys hear that? Oh, 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 phones? Are going to fall apart and number three, it has a USB micro-b 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 like out putting a display poor signal, it's just more fragile, which is an issue that's made worse by the three V's lack of any you know.

Fancy-Pants modern features like wireless charging all right. After all that, though my impression 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 things up. Okay, you can't really hear, but they feel pretty click 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 bloated. 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 opening up folders actually happens pretty smoothly. Even the app launch times mind you we're talking about web browsers and utilities here, not necessarily games, weren't, noticeably bad, but the media tech, 87 35, a quad-core processor, which has four cortex a53 course at his heart, really shows it's uh. Well, it shows its something: 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, look at that. This thing feels noticeably seven or eight years ago.

On that note, though, admiring your handiwork, the screen is far from terror. It's six inches 2160 by 1080. Yes, the fancy new 18 by 9 aspect ratio and the Alcatel website even has a prominent spot on it for the logo of their parent company TCL who's. Four hundred dollar budget TV. We actually really liked in our recent review, along with some messaging about how they relied on T sales screen expertise in order to develop the three V'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 four Ragnarök which well speakers aren't 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 aback, and I was prompted to email Netflix, and they haven't gotten back to me, but as far as I can tell the low resinous of it anyway seems to have to do with the display not being HDR certified. So when I watched this movie side-by-side with the galaxy s 9 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 think you're 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 down 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 cost-saving 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 writer joke haha brighter point was because it constantly under exposes 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 a noticeably inferior but inferior, doesn't mean complete garbage. Its charging is a little slow, but the 3000 William hour 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 dual-band 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 150 dollar model, which means that you won't be installing a ton of heavy apps like games, but it's got micros expansion.

So as long as you don't load up tons of apps, at least you can store your Plex or your Netflix download 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, the speaker is pretty quiet which affects speakerphone calls and watching movies, 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 a hundred and fifty 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.

Memory Express is your go-to destination in Canada for electronics, products and services. If it uses electricity, there's a pretty good chance, memory express carries it and their second anniversary, massive sale is happening both online and in-store, from July 20th to July, 22nd 2018, they're going to have deals on things like laptops, desktops, peripherals and, more so, to receive the deals, make sure you're on there a flier or social media pages they're, also hosting a massive giveaway, including an artist GTX 10 80 TI and an DOG Strip laptop, so visit the link below to enter and if you're in Canada make sure you visit their website from July 20th to 22nd. They should have called it. The rabbit and lionesses face that his old company didn't survive sale. So thanks for watching guys, if this video suck do you know what to do.

But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also link down. There is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, yes and our community forum, which you should totally join.

Source : Linus Tech Tips