Alcatel's Idol 4S Home windows phone debuts at a time in the event the news grows at any time grimmer for this platform. Market share is below just one percent, and buy cheap microsoft windowsproducts chief Terry Myerson downplayed Home windows phones in the the latest interview. Acer and HP have offered up corporate Windows phones, but consumer units have largely disappeared. This really is where by the Idol 4S hopes to help make its mark.
Alcatel's argument is usually a simple just one: Pay $470 (a bit much more than the $400 Microsoft charges for its 5.2-inch Lumia 950) and receive a larger, five.5-inch cellphone. Incorporate to that a VR headset and a few subscription freebies-a 45-day no cost trial of Hulu Plus, a 30-day trial of Microsoft's Groove Music, in addition to a free of charge copy on the Windows ten Cell game, Spartan Assault-and you're buying the best Windows consumer cellphone to the market. Not that you can find numerous of them.
A Home windows clone of an Android cell phone
Even though I haven't compared the two phones side by side, the cheap office 2013 edition from the Idol 4S on paper appears to become identical to Alcatel's existing Android edition with the 4S-a surprising reincarnation on the strategy HTC employed with Windows and Android versions from the HTC A single M8 in 2014.
Similar to the HP Elite x3 business cellphone, the Idol 4S is crafted all-around excellent hardware, though peripherals and added companies are what really set each mobile phone apart. The cellphone itself measures 6.06 x two.97 x 0.28 inches and weighs 0.33 pounds, a bit around the light side. The single-SIM system (sharing a slot with microSD up to 128GB) has a Qualcomm Snapdragon X12 LTE modem.
The metal-and-glass construction in the Idol 4S appears particularly elegant, having a brass metal band sandwiched between the screen glass and also the plastic backing. Incidentally, the band extends slightly beyond the glass, offering what appears to get a degree of protection.
The Idol 4S's five.5-inch, AMOLED display is where you may 1st discover the differences between the Home windows and Android versions. The Android version's display screen is 2560x1440; the Windows version's is only 1920x1080. The Android version also uses a Qualcomm octa-core Snapdragon 652 chip, even though the Home windows model consists of the a lot more powerful four-core Snapdragon 820. A few other specs favor the Home windows mobile phone: Accessible memory is 3.5GB, versus 3GB for Android, and also the provided storage is 64GB, double that with the Android edition.
In daily use, I was a little surprised that I could stack and stack applications during the background without having any apparent slowdown, and everything I threw at the Idol 4S ran fluidly. As our benchmarks demonstrate, the powerful 820 chip places the Idol 4S neck-and-neck together with the HP Elite x3 given that the most powerful cheap office 2016 professional plus mobile phone.