What's in a name, especially when it is a homonym?
With a title best seen rather than heard, the Idol 3 is a 4G smartphone handset from Alcatel OneTouch. This product is available in either 4.7" or 5.5" screen formats. My review unit is of the larger size.
With dimensions of 152.7 x 75.1 x 7.4mm (HxWxD), the Idol 3 follows the standard smartphone look of a device whose front is dominated by the 5.5" capacity touchscreen. The appearance of the handset, with its dark grey body and silver faux trimming, is reasonably appealing.
Delivering a resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels, the screen is best in artificial lighting conditions. I often struggled to read it in bright sunlight. The plethora of finger smears on the screen certainly did not help when viewing.
While the handset felt comfortable, there was one aspect of its layout that I found difficult to adjust to. Other smartphones I have used tend to position the power and volume rocker on the same side of the unit, but this model has the volume rocker is on the right while the power button is located on the left. More conventionally positioned are the 3.5mm jack socket on the top of the unit for the supplied headset and a micro USB port on the base for charging the fixed Li-ion 2910mAh battery which managed over nine hours of video playback during tests.
Positioned below the power button is a small tray concealed within the body of the handset. This tray is released from the body of the unit using a small pin tool. Once the tray has been released, you can insert the SIM and an optional micro SD card. Completing the external features of the Idol 3 are an 8MP front-mounted camera, 13MP rear-mounted camera with flash unit plus two front-mounted speakers.
Whether using the front or rear camera, you have a choice of modes that include Auto, HDR, Pano, Time Lapse, Scanner and Face. For some reason the default setting for the rear camera is 10MP at 16:9 aspect. This can be change to 13MP at 4:3 aspect for content captured at 4128 x 3096 pixels. I felt the quality of captured images was perfectly acceptable.
At the heart of this handset is a Qualcomm MSM8939 Snapdragon 615 processor, which can call upon a quad-core 1.5GHx Cortex-A53, quad-core 1,9GHz Cortex-A53 and Adreno 405 modules. There is 2GB of RAM with 16GB of storage space of which 9.08GB was available once Android Lollipop and other installed apps had taken their fill. Using the micro SD card option, you can increase storage up to 128GB which should be ample for most users.
An initial four-pane Home screen presents the user with icons for Apps, Games, Radio, Mix, Camera, Play Store and Google. There is also a Favourites tray populated with phone, messaging, applications list, email and browser links. From this screen a swipe to the right reveals a choice of wallpapers while a swipe to the left provides access to links categorised as tools, social, media and assistance. Those new to the smartphone arena will appreciate this feature.
Another feature that could well appeal is that the Idol 3 will automatically adjust the screen layout so, regardless of the way you pick up the handset, the display will appear correct rather than sometimes upside down. This is in addition to the more usual standard switching between portrait and landscape orientation.
A handset you would not be ashamed to be seen using.