The Alcatel A5, while equipped with 32GB of space, unfortunately, fails to impress me. Even with the LED light show the phone has going on, it’s exciting and new at first; but as it drains your battery, you slowly begin to despise the LED back cover and find yourself turning off the light show.
Design and Display
With the regular back cover that the phone comes with, the Alcatel A5 is quite slippery and I’ve had to cling onto the phone a couple of times while using it. I happen to be kind of clumsy so a phone that’s constantly slipping out of my hands, even when it isn’t my fault, is no good for me. I tend to prefer the LED back cover (with all the light show features off) because it’s easier to hold and is much more sturdy. The A5 does come with a thin black case as well, but out of the three, the LED back won.
Another factor that made me prefer the LED cover to the regular one was the fact that the regular back makes the camera stick out, making it difficult to put the phone down without worrying about scratching the camera.
The 5.2-inch screen has a pretty mediocre look to it. Coming in at only 720 x 1280 pixels, video quality isn’t as sharp and it just didn’t do much for me, unfortunately.
Software and Performance
The Alcatel A5 comes installed with Android Marshmallow 6.0 which is pretty standard in terms of what you get with the software. It does allow you to change the themes through the Colour Changer app; a feature that I thought was actually pretty neat.
You do, however, need to hold the camera still and for quite a while until you find a colour scheme that you like – which takes a bit of time. I found that in certain lighting, the camera wouldn’t pick up the colours well enough.
Some colours even come out more washed out than they are in real life.
The speakers on the device do get pretty loud, but as you increase the volume, an equal increase in sound quality does not happen. I don’t really expect much from phone speakers, but being able to hear the bass would be nice.
There is a fingerprint sensor on the front of the phone which took me awhile to get used to since my other phone has a sensor on the back. It seemed a little buggy to me – there were times when I’d have to try twice to unlock the phone because it wouldn’t read my fingerprint the first time.
Like I mentioned in the Cons section, the battery of the A5 is nothing to brag about. It significantly gets worse when you have the LED back cover on unless you turn off all features of the Light Show so that the cover doesn’t light up even when you get notifications.
But even with it all off, the battery still isn’t enough to last more than a day.
Light Show
Ignoring the fact that the app pretty much kills the battery, the Light Show is quite entertaining. You can turn it on for your music and the lights move with the beat of whatever you’re playing! It works best with slower songs because it provides for a better pattern.
The app offers a variety of patterns for the lights to move in – Meteors, Fireworks, Stars, Rain, Flames, City Lights, Waves, High way, Petards and Rhythm (this one’s for the lights to move with the music you choose to play).
If you choose any of the patterns while you’re playing your music, it doesn’t really move with the beat. It was still pretty cool to see what the LED back could offer. You could have your own mini disco party!
For example, this was the “High way” light show that I played with my music and the same pattern just occurred throughout.
Camera
The camera on the Alcatel A5 is pretty lacking. With only an 8MP primary camera and a 5MP front-facing, you’re not going to get any special photos.
Unsurprisingly, using the HDR feature takes ages and it only results in slightly different quality photos. The HDR photos just look like they’ve been edited to increase the contrast a tiny bit but I managed to find a weird aesthetic to certain photos (maybe with a little actual editing, it could be Instagram worthy?).
You can create collages with the camera itself too, which I guess is great for people who love to do so.
Verdict
While the Light Show and Colour Changer apps offer something new to mobile technology, the A5 itself doesn’t do much to excite phone users. I’ve found more negative aspects of the phone rather than positive and that’s just not how you want to feel about a phone that looks as neat as the A5 does.
