Gadgetory

what is going on guys long hair from Android Authority and last year Alcatel released the idol X which offered some really nice hardware and specs for a very competitive price and this year Alcatel is back at it again with a successor but does it pack enough punch to really stack up against the competition let's take a look at the Alcatel OneTouch Idol x+ so here it is the Alcatel OneTouch Idol x+ which is kind of a mouthful but let's kick things off starting with the design and build quality and it doesn't necessarily have the most unique design in the world you can definitely tell where they got their inspiration from I won't mention where but it's not a bad looking phone by any means the construction is comprised of a combination of glossy plastic on the back which is very prone to fingerprints an aluminum frame that wraps around the perimeter of the phone that actually makes the phone feel pretty solid in the hand but it is a little bit on the slippery side it's also fairly lightweight at 130 grams and only seven point nine millimeters thick on the top of the phone is the power button with a 3.5 millimeter headset jack a single SIM card slot on the left which is opened by applying pressure towards the top of the door and held shut with a magnet on the right side is a secondary SIM slot with your volume rockers and along the bottom is the microUSB port with a single speaker and a microphone disguised to look like a second speaker for being a single speaker it's actually pretty loud with great clarity but being mounted on the bottom means you're gonna get sideways firing audio when watching videos or playing games and landscape making this speaker extremely easy to cover up muffling the sound flipping around to the front of the phone you'll find a 2 megapixel camera next to the earpiece and typical sensors LED notification light that's hidden unless it's lit up and capacitive back home and menu keys flanking the bottom also on the front which happens to be my favorite part of the design is the super thin bezels which not only allows the display to be the star of the show but also keeps the phone a lot smaller and more compact in comparison to other smart phones with the same display size and speaking of the display it's a 5-inch 1080p pS LCD with 441 pixels per inch and it's actually a pretty good-looking display making it great for watching videos and playing games graphics and text look very sharp with nice color reproduction it doesn't look oversaturated it also has good viewing angles and gets plenty bright making it easy to see outdoors on the inside the idle X plus is rocking a mediatek octa-core processor clocked at 2 gigahertz backed by 2 gigabytes of RAM a Mallee 450 GPU and comes in 16 or 32 gigabytes of internal storage and I guess you could say this processor is the first of its kind it's a true octa-core processor which means all eight cores are actually firing at the same time which is different from what Samsung is doing where it's basically just two quad cores alternating back and forth depending on what it is that you are doing now this processor sounds like an absolute beast on paper but it's based on cortex a7 architecture which is pretty old architecture at this point the performance of the idle X plus isn't bad but it could be better it handles regular day-to-day tasks like swiping through home screens or opening up apps with no issues and it even does a pretty decent job with graphically intensive games like dead trigger 2 and Shadowgun deadzone but sometimes you'll run into some lag or the occasional drop frame which created for a rather inconsistent experience and web browsing performance could also be improved as there's a lot of rendering issues especially when scrolling quickly even on the default web browser the software could be to blame for some of this as it's running on 4.2.2 jelly bean which isn't the latest version of Android or even the latest version of jelly bean and I'd be very skeptical on this phone seeing the light of day when it comes to updates on top of Android 4.2.2 is Alcatel OneTouch UI which is full of very bright and colourful looking icons and transparencies and the UI elements like the folders and notification shape Alcatel does include some rather interesting features like a scrollable home screen dedicated purely to widgets and another home screen for glancing at images in your gallery both of which can be removed if you don't like them it isn't the most intrusive or heaviest skin out there as it does preserve some elements from stock like the app drawer and setting the menu while the color scheme is a little different the overall look has been left intact when this phone is working properly it's actually not half bad but Alcatel OneTouch UI is full of bugs sometimes causing the phone to lock up or just force closing altogether so Alcatel definitely has their work cut out for them as the overall performance leaves a lot to be desired despite its performance issues it's been solid in terms of battery life on the inside it's rocking a non-removable 2500 milliamp hour battery and I got pretty much all day battery life with it I was connected to Wi-Fi the majority of the time most because edge sucks but I got between 18 to 20 hours off the charger and that equated to about four and a half to almost 5 hours of screen on time so I was actually pleasantly surprised especially considering that 2500 milliamp hours is deemed somewhat small in comparison to a lot of other smartphones out there another strong aspect of the idle x+ is on the back and that is the 13 megapixel camera it's got a pretty simplistic and straightforward camera interface with a few shooting modes like HDR panorama night and sport and more advanced options like ISO and exposure to help you get a better looking shot surprisingly the camera takes very nice-looking photos they're very sharp which you sort of expect out of 13 megapixels with color reproduction that is very true to life it doesn't have the fastest shutter speed in the world as taking photos of moving objects even slow ones will result in blurry images but overall the camera performs much better than I expected it to and at an f-stop of 2.0 it does a decent job in low-light as well without creating too much noise if you're in the United States looking to get this phone the biggest deal-breaker will probably be the connectivity as this phone completely lacks LTE due to the mediatek processor and doesn't support any 3G bands on US carriers like t-mobile and AT&T and during my time using it I was actually relegated to edge which created for a rather frustrating experience and for $400 off contract it's a rather steep price to pay for no LTE and the low probability of software updates and there's a lot better options out there that offer a lot more for a lot less like the Nexus 5 for example or the Moto X and even phones like the Moto G and the all-new oneplus one which has been creating a lot of buzz lately and so there you have it overall the idol X plus offers some very decent hardware like the display and camera but suffers from way too many shortcomings to make it a viable option against other smartphones in its price range which basically takes away any competitive edge this phone might have had but that's pretty much it for this review hopefully you guys enjoyed it and found it helpful if you did please give it a thumbs up down below and also subscribe to Angela thority which is also down below and once you're done doing all that make sure to check out the website at Android Authority accom for more content and as always thank you so much for watching and keep it locked on android authority as we are your source for all things Android