The Alcatel One Touch Idol X+ is the international brand’s latest flagship model, and while it’s not as powerful as something like the Galaxy S5 or G3, it still packs plenty of oomph for its price point. The Idol X+ was recently launched at the Elbow Room at Metrowalk in Ortigas and I was able to get some hands on time with the device.
The Design
The Alcatel One Touch Idol X+ is one slim phone and while it doesn’t offer anything new in terms of design, there are enough notable design cues to lend it some character. A silver strip runs along the edges of the device, giving it the illusion that it’s slimmer than it really is. It’s also quite light. It’s an all plastic build, so it isn’t surprising.
The Hardware
The Alcatel One Touch Idol X+ features a 5 inch Full HD IPS screen, which also happens to be exactly the same kind of screen you would see on most mainstream flagship phones. It’s also a one-glass solution, which eliminates the air gap between the LCD panel and the glass substrate on top of it. So not only do you get great color accuracy and brightness, but even better viewing angles than a regular IPS display. Viewing it from an extreme angle gives the impression that the image is floating close to the surface itself.
Underneath the hood beats a 2GHz MediaTek MT6592 octa-core processor paired with a Mali 450 MP4 GPU. The Philippine market isn’t strangers to octa-core phones, however most are clocked at 1.7GHz, giving the Idol X+ a 300MHz speed advantage. The performance boost may or may not be noticeable depending on who’s using it, but running Antutu on it gave it a score of around 28,000 to 30,000 points, whereas regular-clocked MT6592-based phones typically score around 24,000 to 27,000 points.
In addition, the Idol X+ packs a whopping 32GB of storage. It’s not expandable, but the phone does support USB OTG, so you can connect a flash drive in case you need that access to extra storage. Also, it’s not like most people would use up that 32GB of storage anyway
The Software
The Alcatel One Touch Idol X+ runs on Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, which is a bit of a disappointment now that most phones are coming out with KitKat 4.4. I asked if we could expect an update to KitKat and while they did promise there would be one coming out, there was no date given for when it would come out. Still, each of the phones that Alcatel revealed came with a Software Update application and we can expect at least one update within the phone’s lifetime.
Impressions
While it can’t compete with most other international brands and their Snapdragon 801 based phones or better, it can beat out everything else. The performance is somewhere in between this year’s and last year’s flagships, and the price point is pretty attractive too. You even get a JBL in-ear headset with an in-line mic, which is a Php4K value.
So how much is it? Well the Alcatel One Touch Idol X+ will retail for a cool Php18,999. It’s rather pricey compared to our local brands, so I’m not sure how well-received it will be. However, it does have a superior build quality and design compared to the typical locally-branded octa-core smartphone offerings, not to mention the added value of the JBL headset.
