Contents:
The speakerphone delivers an equivalent performance. It's average in every way. You'll find it works well when you're in private spots, but it suffers when you're out in the world.
It's really hard to hear in a moving vehicle, and cranking the volume introduces a lot of distortion. Curiously, the stereo speakers, when used to blast music or watch YouTube videos, sound amazing. The phone's internal amplifiers do a good job delivering clear, full sound that's loud enough to fill a room with your favorite soundtrack.
The Idol series has always boasted this feature, and the Idol 5 delivers the goods when it comes to personal entertainment. Alcatel put a mid-sized 2, mAh battery into the compact Idol 5. The phone can push through a single day, but it does come close to giving up the ghost by bedtime.
You'll have to pay attention to the phone's battery life throughout the day, and I wish that weren't the case. It helps a little bit. The Idol 5 supports rapid charging and the included charger will power it up relatively quickly. The phone does not support wireless charging due to the metal chassis. Bluetooth functions well enough. The phone paired with a range of Bluetooth accessories, including headsets, speakers, and my car.
The device delivered average quality calls through headsets, but terrible call quality through my car's hands-free system. Music sounded decent via Bluetooth speakers, though in some cases you may be better served using the built-in sonic cannons. I had no trouble using the Idol 5's NFC radio. It supports Android Pay, and that's a good thing.
Using Google Maps, the Idol 5 was able to field my general location in several seconds. It took closer to 10 seconds to truly lock down my exact location, and accuracy was never better than about 25 feet. That's pretty good, but I've seen better. Google Maps worked well enough as a real-time navigation tool, but it sometimes lagged my actual location when traveling at highway speeds. Eric has been covering the mobile telecommunications industry for 17 years at various print and online publications.
He studied at Rutgers Newark and University of Kentucky, and has a degree in writing. He likes playing guitar, attending concerts, listening to music, and driving sports cars.
1- Through your Google account. If you have your alcatel Idol 5 linked to a Google account you can know your location by accessing Find My Phone from this. offer privacy controls that let you decide how an application may use the location of your phone and other phones on your account. However, the Cricket privacy.
It has a few unique features like a reversible display and a theme creator that uses the colors the camera sees. Sep 28, Alcatel today announced the Idol 5 for Cricket Wireless. Jan 6, Alcatel today announced four new affordable phones in its 1- and 3-series. While they are mostly similar to least year's models, all have significantly larger batteries. Sep 19, Alcatel today announced the Go Flip 3 and SmartFlip, two variants of essentially the same clamshell-style feature phone.
Comments This forum is closed. New antennas are going up outside apartment windows, and most of us tend to keep our phones quite close to us at all times. CES is the world's consumer tech show. Every year we head out to Vegas to check out everything in person. We honor the standouts with our Best of CES awards. This year, four products wowed us, each for a different reason. It may not seem like phones have changed much since the first iPhone came out. But there are a few key trends in recent years that change the relationship between our phones and our hands. Samsung's second foldable phone takes a different approach: instead of folding larger, it folds smaller, much like Motorola's new razr foldable.
It's cheap for a foldable, but still quite pricey. In the phone world, there's no shortage of Black Friday deals in the US this year.
Samsung's new flagship Galaxy S phones for are somewhat predictable in appearance and features, and they've leaked like crazy, but there are a few surprises. There's no smaller, more affordable model like last year's S10e, nor is there a separate 5G model. OnePlus has an unusually confusing array of different "flagship" phones available right now, but the 7T is the newest mainstream model for most people.
It's still quite high-end, but for a reasonable price and without some of the crazier features of the new Pro models, which most people don't need anyway.
TCL has a new batch of concept phones to show off in that use flexible-display technology in interesting ways. Two are foldables, including a unique "tri-fold" design with two different hinges allowing it to reach full tablet size when open. All Rights Reserved. Content on this site may not be copied or republished without formal permission. OK This is a preview. Click for full glossary page.
By registering, you agree to our Terms of Use. We value your privacy and will never share your email address. Is It Your Type? Body The Alcatel Idol 5 carries over many of the basic design and hardware components we've seen on the Idol series since the Idol 3. Idol 5. About the author, Eric M. Zeman : Eric has been covering the mobile telecommunications industry for 17 years at various print and online publications.
Alcatel Idol 5 5.
This forum is closed. Share on Facebook. Tweet this. Follow phonescoop on Twitter.
This is a preview. The top and bottom edges are bowed, which adds strength. The glass is Gorilla Glass 3; it may not be quite as strong as today's Gorilla Glass 5, but it should still be good enough to protect against most scratches, scrapes, and bumps.
The Idol 5's face is nearly all black thanks to the glass panel that fills the majority. The glass stretches from side-to-side, but the metal framing extends a bit above and below the glass and contains the Idol's iconic stereo speakers. The speaker grilles are drilled into the metal frame and were left unpainted; this means they catch and reflect light, making them highly visible nearly all the time. The glass itself has the slightest of curves where it fits into the slimmest plastic band. You'll find the screen lock button high on the left side of the phone, practically at the top.
I prefer for the screen lock button to be on the right side and found the Idol 5's key hard to find and use. The button does have a good profile, and travel and feedback are pretty good. The volume toggle, positioned on the right edge of the phone, has a similar profile and travel and feedback. It's a round button placed smack in the middle of the right edge of the phone, right where the screen lock button should be.
On the Idol 5, the Now Key can be configured to launch one of several apps. The phone isn't water-resistant, nor rugged in any way. The back cover, pretty as it is with that nice metallic finish, cannot be removed. You won't be able to swap out batteries. The round camera module is located in the far upper left corner of the back side, with the two-tone flash close by.
The Alcatel and Cricket logos are hard to miss. Alcatel did a fine job crafting this mid-sized marvel. It's a compact, attractive handset that offers an experience far above its price point. The 5. It's incredibly sharp; individual pixels are entirely invisible. The screen is also bright, colorful, and accurate. The oleophobic coating on the glass does its job well, mostly keeping fingerprints and grime away.
Even so, I found the screen succumbed to glare outdoors. Indoor visibility is fantastic, but it can be heard to see outside at times. Viewing angles are good, with minimal change in brightness and no change in color. The phone comes with a single VR app called vTime. It runs pretty slowly, and there are lots of obvious pixels when viewing VR content through the viewer.
I tested it around the New York City metro area and found it performed on par with other Cricket-branded phones. Bottom line: the Idol 5 performed as quickly as Cricket allows it to. I didn't run into any trouble streaming low-quality music over the network, but watching YouTube videos even standard resolution via LTE led to some buffering and waiting.