Alcatel OneTouch Pixi 3 (4) — Review

Hardware

Specs

The Pixi 3 isn’t a powerhouse when it comes to specs. I mean, it’s a $59 phone so you shouldn’t go expecting much but the reality is that the performance you get for your $59 is not quite what you’d expect if you read off the spec sheet.

The phone houses a 1GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM under the hood. While Alcatel OneTouch doesn’t go to any effort to name which dual-core processor they use in any of their marketing materials, but it turns out it’s a Mediatek 6572 processor with Mali 400 GPU. For the price point, this isn’t too surprising.

The phone comes with a fairly common 4GB of onboard storage, at first load-up you have 1.86GB available, once you load up Google Play and update standard apps though, you have slightly less. But, you do get a microSD card slot to use and under storage settings you can select microSD card as the system storage.

It’s a Pixi 3 (4), note the (4) because there is a 5” version with same specs just a larger screen – we’re getting the 4” version here in Australia. The Pixi 3 (4) has a 4” screen with 480×800 resolution, it’s a pretty standard specification at this end of the market – we’ll discuss the merits of this screen shortly.

Camera wise, there’s nothing to write home about, Alcatel OneTouch have included a 5MP camera on the rear – 2MP on the front. The rear camera gets a simple LED flash, but there’s no Optical Image Stabilisation at this end of the market, so that’s your option if you want to take shots in low-light situations.

The rest of the specs are pretty average – Bluetooth and Wi-fi, 2G and 3G radios – there is a 4G version, but we’re not getting it here in Australia and there’s a 1400mAh removable battery.

Build Quality

The Alcatel OneTouch Pixi 3 (4)…let’s just call it the Pixi 3, has a fairly cheap, plastic body, it’s chunky, but it’s servicable and has a rear that won’t show up fingerprints if that’s a thing for you, though if you treat it rough and at this end of the market when it invariably ends up in a childs hands it will have a rough life, it will show up the results – sort of like a well lived in shell.

The body has a fairly chunky bezel around the screen at the front. The screen is on there and there’s what I like to see as ‘standard’ Alcatel OneTouch capacitive button layout beneath the screen – yes, the Pixi 3 has capacitive buttons.

The volume rocker and power button are on the left hand side and for some reason the power button is above the volume rocker, a change from what is now the norm on most handsets that made the old muscle memory work hard while checking the phone out.

There’s centre mounted microUSB connection on the bottom and 3.5mm headphone jack at the top. The phone is fairly unremarkable in most respects, it’s your fairly average black rectangle – but not every phone needs to be a standout in design, and serviceable works.

Screen

The Pixi 3 has a 4” TFT screen, it’s got a 480×800 resolution and it’s what you would expect from a phone in this range. The colour reproduction has a white, washed out look to it, that’s about all you can expect.

Brightness though is actually fairly good outside, though you do have to ramp that brightness right up to get it to show you the details in bright glaring sunshine.

As mentioned above, the bezels around the screen are fairly chunky, it’s a design decision when going to this range and I can’t fault Alcatel for doing it, it is what it is.

Battery life

There’s no way to say it other than the way it is – the battery life on the Pixi 3 is terrible. With a 1,400mAh battery, there’s no other way that you can look at it other than that’s what it is. My daily use of the phone is fairly well known, starting at between 5-7am with an hour-hour and a half at the gym with podcasting, before a day of social media with feedly and web browsing. The phone barely makes it halfway.

While it’s easy to simply say that’s nowhere near enough – and for a high-end user, it’s true, the Pixi 3 is not aimed at those users and for casual users, the battery should be fine.

Camera

Camera’s on the Pixi 3 is pretty average. Hardware wise, you’ve got a 5MP shooter with an LED flash on the rear and a 2MP front facing ‘Selfie’ camera on the front.

The front facing camera is nothing special, it takes a basic shot and lets you video conference, but unlike phones like the Desire Eye which jam a 13MP camera on the front you can actually use to take high-end photos – the Pixi 3 front-facing camera is serviceable at best.

The rear camera – it’s a 5MP sensor, isn’t terribly stunning either. You get a fairly washed out shot that doesn’t really represent what you want – but it does let you capture a shot. Turning on HDR doesn’t particularly add anything to pictures, as usual it takes a little longer to take the shot and amps up the colours, but nothing stunning.

The camera app has been tweaked a little to give some features, as mentioned, the camera app includes a HDR mode, it also includes Panorama and Night Shot. There’s settings for Face Detection, as well as advanced options which let you go change ISO and Exposure – as well as the usual options to change picture resolution and switch from 4:3 to full frame capture. There’s also some options for Anti-banding (50Hz or 60Hz).

All-in-all, the camera is definitely not a great feature on the Pixi 3 – it works, you can take an Ok shot if you take the time to get lighting and framing right, but that’s a lot of work and most people just want a camera you can take out and shoot – but, it does work.

Connectivity

The Pixi 3 is a fairly base range 3G phone, it’s got GPS and Wi-Fi (b/g/n) and Bluetooth (4.0 LE) – all the main features you want from a handset.

GPS includes A-GPS, it’s fairly quick to lock on, taking about 10 seconds on average to lock on to 10 GPS satellites or more. Accuracy was down to under 10 feet, which is pretty average for a phone GPS – and Ingress was pretty good, with not too terrible drift.

Wi-Fi was fairly decent – though lack of AC Wi-Fi is a little disappointing in this day and age, but again it comes down to price point and B/G/N Wi-Fi will see you right in most circumstances.
Bluetooth as well was pretty decent, connecting to an Android Wear watch and Bluetooth headset with no issues.

For cellular connectivity, the Pixi 3 is ok, it receives calls and makes them, call quality is ok, but nothing spectacular. Data connectivity is pretty decent, I took a few tests in various areas around Canberra and found them to be Ok, but not stunning – but this is 3G remember, so it’s definitely acceptable.

There are a few missing features from the Pixi 3 – but they’re mostly cursory features that flagship phones tend to carry. Features like NFC, IR Remote control and TV-out via Slimport or MHL, it’s nothing much to worry about though.

Sound

In terms of sound – there’s nothing spectacular on the Pixi 3. The audio is good enough for calls, it does Bluetooth and audio out from the earphone jack, that’s about all that’s required.

Externally, there’s a single rear-facing speaker mounted on the rear next to the camera module. It’s good enough to show off a video or perhaps playback some audio, but it’s by no means a great experience for long term audio playback.

In simple terms, there’s no ‘Boomsound’ quality speakers on the Pixi 3. I`m not really down with what the ‘kids’ are doing these days, but at this price range, it’s natural that kids are going to end up with this phone, so if you’re thinking of purchasing this phone for your kids, probably find out if they like to play audio out loud first.

Performance

There’s no silver lining when it comes to performance on the Pixi 3. The Dual-Core Mediatek processor and 1GB of RAM isn’t high end by any means, and it’s not high-end in terms of real world performance – it’s slow, sluggish and at times completely unresponsive, and that was just in the launcher.

The worst example of lag was when simply loading the home screens – pressing the Home button simply brought up a grey screen with ‘Loading Launcher’ on the screen. Sometimes even loading the app drawer all I saw was a circle ‘loading’ icon for 10 or more seconds.

The phone has minimal internal storage when it’s first used, and that, coupled with the very slow performance is not all that pleasing when trying to run your day-to-day applications. Simply running applications like Feedly, Todoist, Hangouts, Twitter all lagged unbearably – it was completely unusable at times and coloured my impression of the phone hugely.

I was unable to install any of the traditional high-end games: Asphalt or Modern Combat etc. that we normally use to test games, due to lack of space, but I did get Riptide GP2 installed and surprisingly it ran quite well – so there is that.

If you like benchmark results, then the here’s the usual Geekbench and Antutu results: