Alcatel, the TCL-owned brand that recently dropped the ‘OneTouch’ moniker from its name, has launched the Idol 4 smartphone in India. The device is being offered in four different colors – Gold, Metal Silver and Dark Grey. The smartphone is priced at Rs. 16,999 ($252) and is already available for purchase exclusively on the largest e-commerce portal in the country, Flipkart. The Alcatel Idol 4 is a mid-range handset from the Chinese company, and was unveiled just ahead of the Mobile World Congress trade show earlier this year in Barcelona, Spain. Interestingly, as has already been reported, the Alcatel Idol 4 is sold by Canadian tech firm BlackBerry as the DTEK50, which was just launched in India last month alongside the pricier DTEK60.
One of the interesting aspects of the Idol 4 is that it comes in a box that transforms into a virtual reality headset. So for all practical purposes, users get a basic, Google Cardboard-style mobile VR headset for free with every unit purchased. The handset also comes with what the company calls a ‘Boom Key’ that’s capable of carrying out a number of functions based on the duration of the tap. As an example, pressing and holding the Boom button will make the camera click images in burst mode, whereas pressing it normally during recording a video will allow users to broadcast it live. The device also comes with dual speakers and has MaxxAudio technology. Alcatel is also bundling a free JBL stereo headset with the phone.
Taking a quick look at the specs, the Alcatel Idol 4 features a 5.2-inch Full HD IPS LTPS display and is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 617. The device comes with 3GB of RAM and only 16GB of internal storage, it does accept microSD cards of up to 512GB. The phone has a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera that has an f/2.0 aperture and comes with a dual-tone LED flash, phase detection auto-focus (PDAF) and electronic image stabilization (EIS). The front facing selfie-cam is an 8-megapixel unit that also comes with an LED flash and has an 84-degree wide-angle lens. The device supports 4G LTE, dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac over 2.4GHz & 5GHz, Bluetooth 4.2, GPS with A-GPS, NFC and USB OTG. The battery happens to be a 2,610mAh unit that supports Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 2.0.