Looking for a cheap mobile for less than 150 euros? Watch the review of the Alcatel Pop 4 Plus, a mid-range willing to seduce young and old with its 5.5-inch screen with HD resolution, 8-megapixel camera and flash to capture your best selfies.
A price that seduces anyone
Alcatel was for many years one of the brands preferred by the youngest public for the value for money of its terminals and its youthful touch in the design section. And it is that buying a mobile of 800 euros is not an option for all pockets, something that the big manufacturers are already aware of in view of the huge competition within the most economical range.
It is the turn of the analysis of the Alcatel Pop 4 Plus, a smartphone willing to prove that it is possible to buy a good mobile for less than 150 euros without giving up almost nothing both in the section of the specifications and in the aspect of the guarantee, something that cannot be boasted of by Chinese devices that populate online stores like Amazon.
The Pop 4 Plus is the intermediate model within the new Alcatel range in which the Pop 4S stands out as the most powerful terminal, whose arrival in Spain is planned for the second half of this 2016, while the Alcatel Pop 4 is positioned as the most economical version of the three devices.
Is the Alcatel Pop 4 Plus worth buying? Is there a phablet with better value for money in 2016? How good is your camera? Next we try to give answers to all these unknowns that you will surely become if you are thinking of choosing this smartphone.
Non-strident design
The first sensations are outstanding before even turning on the phone, both for the good finish of the sales box and – above all – by the incorporation of JBL headphones that are well above average than we can find in terminals of this range.
If you are thinking of buying the Alcatel Pop 4 Plus you should take into account that it is a very large mobile phone due to its huge 5.5 inch screen that stretches its dimensions up to 151 millimeters high by 77 wide, with a thickness of 8 mm.
On the front dominates of course that huge screen that we will talk about later, surrounded by frames not too bulky. The Pop 4 Plus has backlit physical buttons on the lower frame of the screen, while on the top we find the front camera, the main speaker and the LED for notifications.
The button is located on the right edge in an ergonomic position if you are right-handed but too high if you are left-handed. Meanwhile the left side is completely naked. At the bottom edge we find the main microphone and the conventional microUSB port. On the other side the headset for the calls and the jack jack for the headphones.
The rear shell of the Alcatel Pop 4 Plus is made of talk and is removed by a small slit in the right side corner of the phone. That way we have access to the battery – non-removable – and the triple slot: two SIM card slots and one to expand memory with a microSD.
In short, we are talking about a terminal measured at the design level that does not stand out for good or bad, which is good news in the face of the barrage of cheap terminals that sin of little care in this section. At the ergonomic level, it may have been more successful to accentuate the curve at the rear, but big screen enthusiasts will like it.
A huge screen with nuances
On the screen of the Alcatel Pop 4 Plus we find a 5.5 inch IPS LCD panel that at first glance seems recommended to play all kinds of multimedia contents, especially videos, series or movies if you are one of those who are used to use services like Netflix.
The resolution of the mobile reaches HD (1,280 x 720 pixels) but is not able to play videos in Full HD (1,920 x 1,080 pixels), something that will disappoint the most demanding. Anyway, it’s hard to find a smartphone under 150 euros at that resolution, especially if we want a phone with such a big screen.
The average screen density stays at a reasonable 267 pixels per inch, as the Samsung Galaxy J7 or Microsoft Surface Pro 4 offers. Numbers apart the resolution will be more than enough for the vast majority of users so if you are looking for a cheap mobile with a big screen this Alcatel Pop 4 Plus seems a rather interesting option.
The reproduction of colors is simply correct, although we find an overly pronounced trend towards green tones, with a saturation below average. Fortunately we can calibrate the color temperature and have two modes – natural and vivid – to change the saturation level.
As for the viewing angles the terminal reaches the remarkable while the brightness level is sufficient for almost all scenarios, although obviously we will have trouble seeing the screen outdoors if the rays of sunlight directly affect the screen.
Finally we have detected problems at specific times with the response of the touch screen, especially in periods of very intensive use of mobile phone use. It’s not something that’s going to be a problem for everyone, especially when you consider the price of Alcatel Pop 4 Plus.
Measured performance
This Alcatel Pop 4 Plus hides a Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 processor, a SoC launched during the fall of 2014 aimed at the most economical end-of-range terminals that we can also find – for example – on the Huawei Y6.
Obviously we don’t have in front of the power of a «flagship» in this Alcatel which, however, offers a satisfying daily experience in general terms. For basic everyday use the mobile behaves smoothly and is able to manage multitasking thanks to its 1.5 GB of RAM.
To perform this analysis of the Alcatel Pop 4 Plus we have subjected the terminal to a battery of performance tests and benchmarks that place it in the expected place, although below the Alcatel OneTouch Go Play launched only a few months ago also framed in the most economical range.
In the most demanding video games like the Asphalt 8: Airbone we will not be able to configure the graphics to the highest quality and the loading times are important, but once the wait has been exceeded we will be able to play without any problems and almost without lag, although obviously we are far from the levels of immersion offered by terminals such as the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge.
One of the most common problems among cheap mobiles is overheating, something we have detected slightly in this terminal. This is not a serious problem but you will notice how the thermoperatura rises if you are dedicated to squeezing it to the fullest, something anyway quite common within this price range.
The latest version of Android
At the software level we have the advantage of having as standard the latest stable version of Android Marshmallow (6.0.1) available with all the advantages that this implies at the level of efficiency and autonomy.
However, as usual in Alcatel terminals we find too long a list of pre-installed apps on the mobile phone (bloatware) that take us away from the purest Android experience.