Welcome to a Battery Grip specialist
of the Sony Battery Grip
Not long ago, a $250 unlocked smartphone was probably asking for trouble - a sketchy processor, WVGA display, potato-resolution camera, and 3G were basically what you could expect. But as technology has marched forward, component costs for things like 1080p LCD panels, 13MP camera sensors, and LTE have become much cheaper.
The Alcatel OneTouch Idol 3 5.5" (I know, I know, the name is ridiculous), which I will from here on call the Idol 3 for the sake of brevity and sanity, has the things you want in a modern smartphone. A big - but not ridiculously large - 1080p IPS-LCD display, a modern Qualcomm processor, dual front-facing speakers, LTE, a 13MP Sony IMX image sensor, and a respectably capacious 2910mAh battery with such as Nikon D90 Battery Grip, Nikon MB-B10 Battery Grip, Nikon D700 Battery Grip, Nikon D7000 Battery Grip, Nikon D3100 Battery Grip, Nikon D5100 Battery Grip, Pentax D-BG4 Battery Grip, Pentax D-BG2 Battery Grip, Sony Alpha A550 Battery Grip, Sony A350 Battery Grip, Sony A900 Battery Grip. 16GB of storage is standard budget fare, with the usual microSD slot pinch-hitting for local media storage and the like.
It runs Android 5.0, Alcatel's software skinning is minimal (basically, just some OEM apps and a few minor tweaks to settings), and the design of the device itself is simple and sleek, if not particularly exciting.
This phone is launching in America, and as such, it really doesn't have much competition in the not-quite-high-end and inexpensive market segment. But the competition it does have is well-known to smartphone enthusiasts: the OnePlus One. At $50 more, the One isn't without advantages - a more powerful Snapdragon 801 processor, more RAM, slightly larger 3100mAh battery, and a dedication to providing software updates do make the One quite attractive.
But the Idol 3 offers a larger 8MP front-facing camera, SD card slot (a potential deal-breaker for some), and fits that 5.5" display in a slightly smaller and significantly thinner frame.
But before we get into the specifics, you're probably wondering (come on, at least a little bit) what sort of company Alcatel is and why they're suddenly getting a lot of attention for this smartphone that kind of came out of nowhere. You've likely actually seen some Alcatel phones if you've gone to an American carrier store before, but you probably didn't pay much attention to them, because most of them are... terrible. But that's because they're built for carriers as profit-padding for "free phone" contract customers who think they're getting a deal. This new phone is nothing like that.
Anyway, back to my point: this Alcatel is probably not the Alcatel you're vaguely familiar with, the giant French multinational corporation Alcatel-Lucent. Nope, Alcatel smartphones have literally nothing to do with Alcatel-Lucent other than using the Alcatel brand. Alcatel phones are, in actuality, TCL phones.
TCL is also a very large electronics corporation (read: $16 billion plus in revenues last year) in China, and in 2004, they started a joint partnership with Alcatel-Lucent to make Alcatel-branded phones. A year into the venture, TCL bought out Alcatel's 45% share and retained the right to continue using the Alcatel name for the business. So, there is no meaningful relationship between Alcatel-Lucent and Alcatel smartphones. Fast forward ten years, and that's why this Chinese phone is branded with the name of a French company that does not actually build it.
TCL's smartphone business, by the way, is huge - they shipped more phones than Sony in 2014. And by Q4 of 2014, they were on pace with Xiaomi and LG. The only companies shipping significantly more phones are the obvious ones: Samsung, Apple, Huawei, and Lenovo / Motorola. So, yes, this is a very big company that sells a hell of a lot of phones. Now, let's talk about that phone.