Alcatel 3X 2019 review

Where to buy

Alcatel doesn't really do "flagship" phones, because its entire market presence for some time now has been in the low-end of the budget market. Indeed, with parent company TCL now launching its own affordable flagship in the form of the TCL Plex, there's even less space for Alcatel to have a "flagship" of its own.

However, at $299 outright, that's pretty much what the Alcatel 3X 2019 represents. It's Alcatel's current "best" phone, but it's also a good example of what you can get for under $300 right now.

Design

• 6.52-inch display with teardrop notch
• Only HD+ resolution
• Rear fingerprint sensor
• Feels much more premium than its price would suggest

• Read our full review of the Alcatel 3X 2019's design

  Most Alcatel phones have felt exactly like you'd expect a budget phone to feel. Over the years the design style has changed up markedly, but they've all been largely plastic body phones that absolutely feel like cheap handsets. Which is fine within the kinds of price brackets that Alcatel typically plays in.

  The Alcatel 3X 2019 is genuinely different in this respect. While it's still a plastic body phone, it feels significantly more solid and rigid than prior Alcatel models I've tested. There are some nice small design elements at play here, from the slightly reflective back – which is naturally enough a fingerprint magnet – to the textured sides that give it a premium feel and plenty of grip.

  It's fronted by a 6.52-inch LCD display with an HD+ resolution of 720 x 1,600 and a 20:9 aspect ratio. This makes for a tall phone and one that's not quite as sharp as we've seen from other phones at this price range. There's a very small teardrop style notch at the top of the screen and relatively minimal bezels at the bottom.

  Around the back of the Alcatel 3X 2019, there's a triple camera array with a moderate bump and a well positioned rear fingerprint sensor.

  While we're starting to see some budget makers shift towards in-display fingerprint sensors, there's something to be said for a physical rear sensor in terms of sensitivity.

  I certainly had no issues with the rear fingerprint sensor on the Alcatel 3X 2019, although you could opt for facial recognition (with less security) via Alcatel's "Face Key" if you prefer. This is simple image recognition, though – expecting something on par with Apple's FaceID for this price would be highly optimistic.

Camera

• Triple cameras with standard, wide and depth sensing
• Slow camera app

• See sample photos and read our full review of the Alcatel 3X 2019's camera

  Alcatel is not well known for its camera prowess, but that's historically been part and parcel of living in the budget space. In more recent times we've seen more focus on delivering good phone camera experiences from budget phone makers, and that's meant Alcatel has had to step up its game.

  The Alcatel 3X 2019 features a triple rear camera array, led by a primary 16MP f/1.8 lens. The secondary lens is an ultrawide 8MP f/2.2 sensor, and in a manner similar to so many budget phones we've tested in 2019, the third lens acts as a depth sensor, with a 5MP f/2.4 resolution.

  It's certainly a fair recipe in pure specifications terms, but Alcatel is still lagging just a little in delivering pleasing camera experiences. Its provided camera app isn't particularly fast to load and is a somewhat muddled experience to get used to.

  The three primary modes are for auto, portrait and wide shooting, with a wide choice of shooting styles hidden under a "More" menu option. This includes time lapses, manual mode, a variety of filters, light traces and even a rudimentary AR Emoji mode if you like that sort of approach.

  Switching modes is likewise slow, so if you do decide that your standard shot will look better with the wide camera, you'll have a long pause while you switch to that mode and lens.

  The actual output of the Alcatel 3X 2019 is fair, but not great. Here, Sydney's recent bushfires haven't helped in terms of testing out the wide lens for proper landscape photography, but in more small-scale testing in reasonable light, the Alcatel 3X 2019 performs as well as you might hope a phone in this price space would do.

  No better than that, which means that Alcatel is still following rather than leading in the budget space, and predictably if you want fast motion or low light shooting you're not likely to get great results.

  It's much the same story around the front, where the selfie camera can take decent shots, but nothing stellar. There's an inbuilt selfie mode there too, but of course without a secondary depth camera, it's just using computation to give you bokeh, with predictably artificial looking results.

  Alcatel 3X 2019 sample photos

  

  

  

  

  

Performance

• Mediatek Helio P23 isn't quick
• Android 9 with colourful Alcatel launcher
• Embedded ad app is annoying

• View test results and read our full review of the Alcatel 3X 2019's performance

  Alcatel's budget positioning means that you're rarely going to get anything but a low-end processor in its phones, and that's certainly the case with the Alcatel 3X 2019.

  It runs off the Mediatek Helio P23 with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. While we don't have too many other examples in Australia of phones running on the Helio P23, it didn't take me too long to realise that this isn't a fast system, even within the budget space.

  Here's how the Alcatel 3X 2019 compares against a range of budget handsets running Geekbench 5's CPU test:

  And here's how it compares using 3DMark's Slingshot Extreme:

  The Alcatel 3X 2019 runs on Android 9, and I was impressed by the fact that during my test period, security updates flowed through to the handset. You don't always see that with lower-end smartphones, although those updates also brought with it some rather unwelcome software as well.

  Alcatel has embedded its own adware on the Alcatel 3X 2019, and I wasn't happy when, upon rebooting following a system update, I was presented with an ad splash screen rather than the handset itself. It appears to run from an Alcatel pre-installed app called enjoy.now which you can't actually uninstall. It's not serving up ads all the time, to be fair – but even once is one time too many.

Battery life

• 4,000mAh battery gives good battery endurance

• View test results and read our full review of the Alcatel 3X 2019's battery life

  Alcatel has stepped up its battery game a touch with the Alcatel 3X 2019, dropping a 4,000mAh sealed battery behind its display.

  It's one area where that low power Mediatek processor actually pays off, because it's not working that hard or sapping the battery all that much.

  Running our standard YouTube test, with a full screen video at maximum brightness and moderate volume for an hour, the Alcatel 3X 2019 compared well:

  Recharging is via USB C, although the supplied charger is only a standard one rather than any kind of rapid charger, so you'd want to make sure you plugged it in overnight to ensure it was charged in the morning. In my experience it's easily good for a single day's battery life, and if you were only a moderate user, you could stretch that reasonably far into a second day.

Should you buy the Alcatel 3X 2019?

• Nicely built, but not quick

Any budget phone involves compromises, and in 2019 it's very much a question of picking what your compromises of choice are going to be. The Alcatel 3X 2019 is a very well built phone for the money, and its battery life is equally very good. Its camera performance is only ordinary at best, even with multiple lenses, and its overall app performance isn't on par with similar phones.

Pricing and availability

Amazon

Specifications