There’s no surprise that the 18:9 aspect ratio would eventually trickle down into the hands of budget handsets, but Alcatel has done it, with the introduction of the Alcatel 3C. It’s not quite the top end spec phone from Alcatel as they’re now pumping out the Alcatel 5, but it sits comfortably among their mid-range offerings.
You can find the Alcatel 3C on most markets at around £130 retail, which for a phone with an 18:9 screen is quite amazing. It’s no bigger than other recent Alcatel handsets, but because of the screen, feels slightly bigger in the hand.
The screen measures at 6″ in size and has a 1440 x 720 resolution, so much smaller than the more high end 18:9 screens on the market. Unfortunately, this is where it loses quality over the higher end Alcatel handsets, and because brightness and contrast of the screen is very sub par, media consumption does suffer.
The design of the phone however looks pretty good. The bezels on the left and right side are slim enough to fit in with modern offerings, but the forehead and chin of this device somewhat ruin the true full screen type feeling you get from something like the iPhone X. The power and volume rocker is on the right hand side as standard and the fingerprint sensor is on the back under the camera.
The back looks pretty special too, with a finish that reminds me of the rough covering of older laptop screens and the ability to have a decent radial reflection pattern in a burst like fashion. The rear comes in several colours including metallic blue, black and gold. There’s also dual sim capability so you can have two mobile numbers or a mobile number and data plan on separate sim cards.
It runs internally a Mediatek MT8321 which is a quadcore processor clocked at 1.3 GHz with 2GB RAM. The phone was fast enough to run your most important social media apps, as well as games, but don’t expect it to be speedy at doing so. Even the fingerprint scanner takes a second or so to open the phone.
I must say storage space is less than ample. There’s 16GB overall, which is tiny compared to the 32/64GB phones of today. In real talk though, you’ll probably end up with around 10GB once software and apps are accounted for. There is a microSD card slot though to expand this up to 128GB which I would recommend doing.
On the back you have a 8MP camera, and a further 5MP selfie cam on the front. Both are ample, but you lose things like a bokeh portrait mode and other effects you can instil in-phone. Instead, you have standard/auto, panoramic and something called a Social Mode which looks to reduce the photo to a 4:3 format for social media and adds a preview for instant sharing on the bottom half of the screen. Not hugely useful though. Pictures come out quite grainy, and is definitely not ideal for low light conditions.
There’s a 3000mAh battery inside too so it’ll be big enough to get you through the day with moderate usage. It uses microUSB to charge the device too which is a little bit of a let down seeing as USB Type-C is becoming more common in our lives. I’m not sure why manufacturers still decide to use the old connection. There’s also no fast charge here either. The Alcatel 3C comes with Android 7.0 Nougat. Upon checking updates, it told me the phone is up to date, so no newer versions of Android unfortunately at this time.
The Alcatel 3C is what it is, a budget handset. It doesn’t have many bells and whistles, but you can’t expect that from a phone that costs around £100. Its dual sim feature is nice if you’re using this phone abroad and need a local sim as well as your home sim. The camera unfortunately doesn’t carry much weight but the battery life is somewhat good. This is an average middle of the road phone, which is pretty much expected for something sub £100. You can find more information from the Alcatel website.
