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The Alcatel brand has some claim to fame within the Android ecosystem. The Alcatel 1X was the very first Android Go phone to launch in February 2018. Video capture quality, meanwhile, is just as poor. The Alcatel 1 records footage at 1080p and 30fps. It’s unstabilised, so even when filming with a steady hand, the footage looks distractingly shaky. Anything further than 100m away is also drastically blurred, so it’s not well-suited to outdoor video capture. Alcatel 1 review: Software how can I set my alcatel 5033x up to automatically switch from mobile data to wifi without having to rely on remembering to switch off mobile data to ensure my mobile data does not incur charges. In other words can I leave both wifi and data on and set it up so that I automatically connect to other wifi including house wifi It was more revealing than I anticipated. It turns out the Alcatel 1 (2021) is exactly the same phone as the Alcatel 1 (2018), only selling for even less money. The likely culprit for this is the Alcatel 1 (2021)’s meager 1GB of RAM. We typically balk when a phone has just 2GB or even 3GB of RAM these days, so 1GB is slightly scary.Unsurprisingly, Genshin Impact won’t even install on the Alcatel 1 (2021). Slightly more surprisingly, nor will Vampire Survivors – a more recent but decidedly less technically demanding 2D game. The fact that the battery is removable means you can extend this quite easily, but buying extra batteries will add to the cost significantly, at which point you might as well buy a better phone. Alcatel 1 review: Camera It’s another example of a specification that seems to come from the smartphone past,” I said from the wintery depths of 2018. In early 2023, this component is practically a fossil.
Of course, with such an unusually small, dim, and pixel-sparse display, that battery is having to drive a lot less action than usual. With performance so limited, meanwhile, you won’t want to use the phone for much more than light phone calls. On those terms, it’ll get you through a full day without too much issue. Viewed from the front, the Alcatel 1’s design could be mistaken for a white iPhone 5S. The casing is plastic right the way around, though, so it doesn’t feel anything like it. Alcatel describes the phone’s unibody case as a “premium” design with a “metallic finish”. It’s neither of those things, unfortunately. Android Go certainly seems like a novel way to save storage space and improve launch times on ultra-budget phones like the Alcatel 1, but at the end of the day, it’s no silver bullet. The Alcatel 1 still runs everything terribly, terribly slowly; that’s not a fault of Android Go, but the poor hardware it’s running on. Alcatel 1 review: VerdictI’ve already mentioned one of the key reasons behind this old-school feel: the Alcatel 1 (2021) is actually the Alcatel 1 (2018). It’s got the same design and the exact same measurements: a 137.6 x 65.7 x 9.8mm body with a 134g weight. Like its predecessor, the Alcatel 1 (2021) only comes with a 2000mAh battery. That’s less than half the capacity of most modern Android phones.
Needless to say, performance here is awful in every way. Apps take an age to load, menus creak and groan, and everything appears to move along at a snail’s pace. Don’t expect to jump into the camera app when you spot a shooting opportunity either. Despite those large bezels, this feels like a remarkably small phone by modern standards. Even the Asus Zenfone 9, which is the smallest Android phone I’ve used of late, feels large alongside it. The closest comparison I can draw here is the iPhone SE (though obviously not in terms of quality). With that in mind, the Alcatel 1 (2021)’s benchmark scores make for ugly reading. An average Geekbench 5 multi-core score of 165 and a single-core score of 79 puts the Alcatel 1 (2021) firmly toward the very bottom of the smartphone performance league table. Android 11 (Go edition) comes installed out of the box. This is the main (and possibly only) change from the Alcatel 1 (2018), which shipped with Android 8.1.The Alcatel 1’s display is also pretty low on quality. In our tests, it produced 71% of the sRGB colour gamut and of those colours only white was accurately replicated. The rest were wildly off the mark: reds, pinks, purples, blues, greens, and grey tones were all a long way from what they should be. So how much smaller are they? On the Alcatel 1, the regular Maps app takes up 89.5MB, while Maps Go is a mere 375KB. Quite the difference! Functionally, though, the regular and Go versions are quite different. For a start, the ‘Find my location’ feature is less reliable on Maps Go, and the step by step directions breakdown has the look of a much older, more primitive version of Maps. There’s also no ‘Share’ function on Maps Go for forwarding the journey information on to others. However, any form of media will hit it hard. An hour of Netflix streaming sapped 18% of a full charge, while an hour of YouTube Music streaming sapped 7%. By way of a comparison, the Moto G22 (a very typical affordable phone) lost 3% and 1% respectively in the same tests. That extends to the phone’s display, which is the same 5-inch 960 x 480 TFT LCD. In my review of the Alcatel 1 (2018) I called this panel “a small, dull, blurry and overly reflective screen, which is all but impossible to use outside on a bright day”. Can you guess what I think of it here at the beginning of 2023? Android Go apps do launch faster than the standard apps – 8 seconds versus 12 seconds when I tested this with Google Maps – but there’s not much, if any, uplift in performance over the regular apps. That said, it’s only through Android Go that demanding apps like Google Assistant are able to work on phones with 1GB RAM.
It feels a little weird steering people away from one of the cheapest phones on the market, especially in these financially challenging times. But while the Alcatel 1 (2021) is incredibly cheap, it is not one of the best cheap phones. And, lastly, the Google Play Store will also notify Android Go users of new or recommended apps that have a Lite or Go version. And Go apps also give you control over whether each individual app is allowed to work over cellular or is restricted to Wi-Fi only.
The Alcatel 1 (2021) is so old school, it comes out of the box with the rear cover and battery removed. You have to slide the SIM (thankfully a nano) into the little slot below the cover, just like you used to do with the Nokia feature phones of old. GSM-Forum > GSM & CDMA Phones / Tablets Software & Hardware Area > Alcatel > Alcatel TCL Phones and New Models
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