TCL is another Chinese manufacturer that may be better known for their affordable home entertainment lineup rather than their smartphones, they actually use the Alcatel brand to sell their products outside of China. We’ve been hearing about a TCL handset that has decent specifications and a very low price, it’s known as the TCL 3S and the fact that it will be available in just two days from now is not the most interesting aspect of this phone. Most of the features belong to a mid-range phone, but the 5-inch Full HD display is a welcome addition as it results in a very high 443 ppi density.
The processor included is the octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 so the preinstalled Android Lollipop can take advantage of the 64-bit architecture along 2 GB of RAM for a good multitasking experience. Its battery has the large capacity of 3,050 mAh and the internal memory included is 16 GB but it’s expandable by Micro SD cards. The cameras have acceptable resolutions at 13 megapixels in the back and 8 megapixels in the front. Now, for the interesting part, two aspects stand out. First, its price is the equivalent for $129 (it will probably only be sold in China) which is already a good price for such specs, but it actually includes an iris scanner for security concerns.
Biometric security has always been considered efficient because they work on the individual characteristics (there are obvious risks too if they end up in the wrong hands). While fingerprint scanners are now a popular feature among flagship smartphones, it hasn’t reached phones in different range prices. The VivoX5 Pro offers similar specs to the TCL S3, including the iris scanner, but it is priced much higher. It’s still too early to judge how efficient or accurate these new kind of scanners are (or the necessary conditions for them to work, perhaps they need a certain amount of light), but if they worked as promised, it would be interesting to unlock our phones or skip a few passwords using them. Also, the low price of the TCL 3S indicates that this technology is not as expensive as a fingerprint sensor, so a lot of phones could see a benefit from it.