Alcatel A5 LED review
Build Quality
Phone Set Up
Features
Camera & Video
Battery Life
LED light show cover
Our Alcatel A5 LED review highlights an affordable Android smartphone that would make the perfect gift for younger phone users and teens. The LED light show cover is the star attraction, whereas everything else fits into what we would expect from a 2017 budget phone.
Build Quality
Metallic frame and a HD display
The Alcatel A5 LED has just a touch of premium with its metallic frame. In the box, you will find two back covers. The first is the standard Metallic Black cover, which gives the phone an overall thickness of 7.7mm and a weight of 137g. The second is the LED back cover and when this is fitted the phone has a thickness of 10.2mm.
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The 5.2” display has HD resolution (1280 x 720 pixels) and this gives plenty of detail for viewing webpages, looking at images and for watching videos. A Mediatek 1.3GHz octa-core processor with 2GB RAM runs the show and this offers minimal lag when switching between apps or when playing graphics intensive games.
Phone Set Up
Transferring content, security and privacy
The Alcatel A5 LED has a 16GB memory and 10GB of this is free for transferring over your content from an old smartphone. There is a microSD card slot, so you can boost the memory in the future, by up to 128GB.
You can secure the phone with a PIN or password and when you have done this, you can use the phone in Private Mode or activate the Smart Lock feature. With Smart Lock, you can have the phone remain unlocked when in safe environments, like your home, if you wish.
Features
LED cover
The Alcatel A5 LED has a standout feature, which is the Lightup+ LED cover. This cover incorporates 35 LEDs and the fun features that these give are controlled through the Light Show app.
The features of the LED cover include:
- Notifications - The LEDs can alert you to social media notifications, alarms and calls. As an example, the background lights up as blue for Facebook and the letter F scrolls across the cover. For Snapchat, the background lights up as yellow and the letter S scrolls across the cover.
- Light Show - You can play music and the LEDs create a light show that is linked to the tempo of the music.
- Colour Catcher 2.0 - Here you can create LED back cover themes that are inspired by up to five colours from any image or object.
Android OS
The Alcatel A5 LED runs on Google’s Android 6.0 MarshMallow operating system and this brings with it great apps and features, such as Google Voice Typing, Maps, YouTube, Google Now and Chrome.
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Alcatel has added a WallShuffle feature and this gives you a different lock screen background, every time that you wake the phone up.
Camera & Video
13MP camera
The Alcatel A5 LED has a 13MP camera with a dual tone LED flash. There are plenty of camera features to help you get good photographic results and these include Instant Collage, PANO, low light enhancement, anti-shake, auto scene detection, video stabilisation, time-lapse and 1080p (Full HD) video recording.
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The 8MP Selfie camera has its own LED flash and this is very useful for taking selfies on a night out. You can use Face Beauty enhancements to perfect the results or have a little fun with Face Show animations.
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Battery Life
2,800mAh battery
The 2,800mAh battery performs well and gives up to 15.5 days of standby or up to 21 hours of talk time.
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Written by: Michael Brown