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Battery life
- 3,000mAh
- Mediocre stamina
Given that the Alcatel 1X (2019) isn’t particularly well-endowed in the chipset department, and that it doesn’t have to push around a lot of pixels on its 720p display, the provision of a 3,000mAh battery would seem pretty generous.
This isn’t the two-day device that you might be hoping for, though. It’s firmly in the ‘nightly charge’ category, and intensive tasks will really hit it hard.
Our standard battery test is a 90-minute looping 720p video, with the brightness cranked up to full. With the Alcatel 1X (2019), this ate through 18% of its juice. The Nokia 5.1, by contrast, lost only 13% in the same test, while the Moto E5 dropped by just 8%.
If you’re an extremely light user - which is possible if you’re shopping at this end of the market - then your mileage will be much better. But then, so it should be.
Camera
- Dual 13MP/2MP camera shoots 16MP stills
- No auto HDR
The Alcatel 1X’s camera appears to have a very similar set-up to 2018’s Alcatel 3V - that is, a 13MP and 2MP camera that uses some software trickery to capture 16MP images.
As is common with many low-end smartphone cameras, the Alcatel 1X (2019) struggles with exposure. On a bright day shooting various flower shots, our landscape shots would often overexpose, while close-ups of said bright flowers would underexpose, rendering the overall tone of the image rather murky.
This could have been mitigated with the kind of default auto HDR mode that even fairly humble smartphones have these days, but it’s either on or off with the 1X.
Flipping the HDR mode on yielded improved - if slightly false-looking - results. You can feel the strain this extra photographic processing is putting on the Alcatel 1X’s meagre hardware, though, with extended pauses between shots.
We also found that the Alcatel 1X (2019) would struggle with auto-focusing, and would frequently fail to lock on to a close-up subject. It just didn’t feel very smart or flexible in everyday settings.
In decent, unchallenging lighting conditions, the Alcatel 1X (2019) is capable of capturing some adequate shots. In optimal conditions, the color temperature and detail (provided you don’t zoom in) are pretty much on point.
Take the 1X into less well-lit environments, however, and it will suffer. Even reasonably well-lit indoors environments showed a lot of grain and noise, occasionally resembling some kind of bizarre Instagram filter in its attempts to compensate for the lack of information hitting its sensor.
That smaller secondary camera isn’t a stand-alone operator, but rather enables you to take portrait shots with exaggerated bokeh effects. This can be adjusted after the fact, from f/1.0 right up to f/16.
The phone’s portrait mode can actually be quite effective, and the ability to crank up (or down) the aperture rating to exaggerate or decrease the depth of field effect works reasonably well. We still noticed some visual artifacts when taking such shots, however, and you’re generally best off simply trying to take a normal close-up.
