Alcatel Idol 3: Holding its own with a pretty decent 5.5 inches

Sounds respectable

My one issue with the design is the size and placement of the power and volume controls. Both are rather small and are situated on opposite sides of the device, making one or the other hard to reach depending on which hand you have it in.

The tap-screen-to-awaken/sleep feature goes some way to alleviate the problem, but a better solution would have been to put both buttons on the same side.

SIM/MicroSD card slot a bit fiddly. Power button a bit small. Same goes for volume control on other side

Those stereo speakers are the Idol 3’s other claim for your attention. Developed in partnership with JBL they are really rather good. Close to HTC One BoomSound good, in fact. With plenty of volume and a decent wedge of bass they produce a tight and punchy sound.

JBL has had a hand in the creation of the Idol 3’s music app, too. Called Mix, as well as working as a regular music player there is an impressively capable DJ mode, which lets you mix tracks, add effects and beats and record samples. It’s not a feature everyone will find a use for, but hats off to JBL and Alcatel for cooking something up beyond the usual, useless bloat.

The Mix music app lets you mix tracks, add samples and beats, save results. Not an essential feature but well designed and fun

To sweeten the deal there are a pair of JBL earphones in the box. I think these are specially made for the Idol 3 package as I can’t find a matching product on sale from JBL, but they are comfortable, sound good and feature heavyweight ribbon cable which suggests durability.

The JBL sound modification setting (it’s either off or on) is an acquired taste, but it does add an impressive amount of space and openness to the signal generated by Qualcomm’s Hexagon V50 DSP.

The Idol 3’s innards are standard fare: a Snapdragon 615 SoC with quad-core 1.5GHz and 1.0GHz Cortex-A53 processors, the Adreno 305 GPU and 2GB of RAM. The AnTuTu benchmark score of 32,000 is exactly where you’d expect it to be. The Honor 7’s HiSilicon Kirin 935 SoC can return slightly higher scores, but the difference is meaningless in everyday use.

Honor 7 has the Idol 3 beat in AnTuTu test but so what? Scores are par for the Snapdragon 615 course

The Idol 3’s cameras are wholly competent if unexceptional. The main camera is a Sony Exmor IMX214 component and takes just as good a snap as it does when fitted to any other mid-range handset. Just steer clear of the HDR mode as it gets rather carried away with itself and produces unrealistic levels of contrast and colour.