It’s tough to recommend an unlocked smartphone over the Idol 3. It’s a great value for the $250 that the company is asking for the phone. And now it’s gotten even better, with it getting root access today. Thanks to a few users over at XDA Developers, those with the Alcatel OneTouch Idol 3 can get their root on. It’s a bit of a long process, but it’s not tough at all to do. Make sure you follow the directions and the XDA thread with all the instructions is listed in the sources down below. It should also be noted that you will need a Windows PC, as this does not yet work on Mac OS X or Linux just yet. However that could change in the future.
The Idol 3 is still one of my favorite “surprise” phones of this year. What I mean by a surprise phone, is that we never really saw any leaks of the device, until it was announced at Mobile World Congress earlier this year. It has a 5.5-inch full HD display, as well as a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor inside powering the show with 2GB of RAM for multi-tasking. Additionally it has 16GB of storage along with a microSD card slot so you are able to expand the storage. And it’s running stock Android Lollipop. All this for just $250.
For those of that have picked up the Alcatel OneTouch Idol 3, you’ll be happy to know that this root exploit does work on the latest version of the software that Alcatel OneTouch has pushed out. That is the one with the latest camera enhancements, which only pushed out a few weeks ago. Right now, it’s only confirmed to be working on the 5.5-inch version of the device, and that is because the 4.7-inch version is not available just yet. While it was announced, and we got hands on time with it in Barcelona, we have yet to hear anything further on it. However, having root now paves the way for custom ROMs, kernels and much more for this device. It’s definitely looking like a phone that you’d want to recommend or even pick up for yourself. Even if it is a back up device.