The Alcatel 3L is the budget option in the Alcatel family and is very similar to the Alcatel 3 (£79.95 from Argos). The Alcatel 3L costs (£174.99 from Littlewoods) and first impressions are hight light this phone is.
The Alcatel 3L offers snapdragon 429 chipset but it does come with less storage compared to the Alcatel 3. The Alcatel 3L does offer some great features such as a dual rear camera, face unlock, AR emoji and comes in 2 colours black or Blue.
The design of the Alcatel 3L design wise really does look nice and expensive with the display taking up most of the phone apart from the notch that has the front camera and is centred on the phone.
The back of the phone has a textured rear which I feel would benefit the user in terms of grip as it won’t just slip out of your hand. What you do notice is the weight of this phone is so light at only 145g.
Other design features you notice this phone has a headphone jack which is something I have not said in a review for a while and then the power and volume buttons are on the right-hand side of the phone.
The screen is 5.94 inches tall and has a 720p HD+ resolution which is expectable for the price but does affect the clarity in the screen. However, I was still able to use the phone fine and got clear images and text when using this handset.
After using this phone for the last week and a half performance wise its ok your for the general phone user like my girlfriend this phone does what is expected with the use of a Snapdragon 429 chipset allows the use of Android 8 oreo to appear quite fast. Storage wises it’s not a big as the Alcatel 3 but it does come with 16GB of internal storage but you only really get to use 9GB of storage as the operating system takes of space meaning if you are that selfie taker you won’t have much space to store all these lovely pics. Fear, not this phone has a MicroSD slot that will give you an extra 128GB. Last but not least this phone has a 3,500mAh battery which means you should last the day without having to grab for the trusty charger.
Moving onto the most important part the camera set up. The rear offers a 13MP sensor above the 2MP depth sensing lens this is designed in mind for the portrait mode. This phone also has an automatic scene recognition which can detect 21 different scenes and changes depending on the situation to aid in taking these pictures.
The unique addition to this phone is the AR Emoji which allows you to control facial expressions of the on-screen characters. You would expect this on an iPhone XS and Alcatel do a decent job but you are limited to only 3 animals to pick from which is nothing like what you get on the iPhone but considering the cost, this is still a nice feature to have.
Overall, this is a phone is acceptable for the cost and you do not expect the world for a phone under the £200 mark but this phone performed quite well. I liked the design of the and the weight of this phone its so light which I loved. The screen is also a bonus with a 5.94-inch screen which means you can to use every inch of it which is great when am watching Netflix. The negatives of this handset, however, is the storage it just was not enough for me and the fact the operating system takes so much space its a concern.
Apart from that, I like the emoji feature as well as the automatic scene recognition which really does aid with your picture taking. So for £174.99 its a good phone for those on a budget I just would have hoped for more storage.
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