Review Alcatel One Touch Pop C7 Smartphone
For the original German review, see here.
Alcatel is not an unknown mobile-phone manufacturer. With the One Touch Easy, the French manufacturer launched a popular device several years ago. Meanwhile, a lot has happened in the mobile-phone segment, but it remains questionable whether Alcatel can keep up with the rapid change. With the Pop C7, a smartphone was added to the One Touch series. The quad-core SoC works with 1.3 GHz per core and only features 512 MB RAM. With 5-inches and an FWVGA resolution (854x480 pixels), it is an entry-level device. Currently the cheapest smartphone is available for 149 Euros (~$204) in online shops. It remains to be seen whether it can keep up with the Moto G and other competitors.
Case
With 162 grams, the Pop C7 is not light. The equally big Nexus 5 weighs 130 grams and the iPhone 5C weighs only 132 grams. Our test sample has a slightly higher weight because of its massive build quality. The case can only be depressed or twisted with force. It's needless to search for gaps or sharp edges. The removable back cover is made from matte plastic and is not prone to fingerprints. We are positively surprised by the build quality. The smartphone appears high-end and robust.
With a size of 141 x 71.8 x 9.9 mm, it is bigger than the Nexus 5 from Google in all directions (although they have the same display diagonals).
Connectivity
The smartphone looks like any other. Interfaces and buttons are in the usual locations and the soft key navigation bar is no longer new, either. The replaceable battery and a microSD slot are hidden beneath the back cover. Another special feature is a double slot for SIM cards. Two SIM cards can be inserted here.
Software
Alcatel preinstalled Android Version 4.2.2. The launcher was slightly modified by the manufacturer and only a small amount of software is preinstalled. The flash memory only has a meager capacity of 4 GB. If the memory was not expandable via microSD slot, it could only be used with limitations.
Communication & GPS
The two SIM slots have different classifications. The slot for the primary SIM card uses a 3G connection, while the secondary slot can only establish 2G connections. This is done in GSM quad-band with the following frequencies: 850/900/1800/1900. UMTS uses the following frequencies: 900/2100 MHz (HSPA+: 21 MBit/s download speed, 5.76 MBit/s uplink speed). In our test scenario, there were no issues with the receiving quality. WLAN connections also worked flawlessly. Standard 802.11 b/g/n is supported. Bluetooth version 4.0 is also incorporated and an aGPS module can be used for navigation.
Compared to our GPS reference device, the Garmin Edge 500, the Pop C7 omits 700 meters. The inaccuracy is especially very big where two road sections are close to each other.
Telephony and speech quality
The speech quality is alright and can hardly be criticized. In our opinion, the voice of our partner is slightly too quiet. So, it is difficult to understand the partner in loud environments.
Cameras & Multimedia
The Pop C7 only features a single camera with a maximum resolution of 5 MP. An LED flash is also incorporated on the rear side and makes the scenes slightly brighter. Videos can be recorded in HD quality (720p) with 30 frames per second.
Images look somewhat pale and the camera tends not to lighten dark parts of the images correctly. The Pop C7 is certainly sufficient for occasional snapshots, but you should not use the smartphone camera as a permanent replacement of a digital camera.
Accessories & Warranty
The warranty of the Alcatel One Touch Pop C7 is 12 months. However, battery and other accessories are only covered 6 months by the manufacturer's warranty. Apart from the modular power adapter, an on-ear headset is included despite the low price.
Input Device & Handling
Inputs via the capacitive display are also recognized precisely in the corners of the display, but the low performance of the device gets apparent. Time and again you need to wait for reaction to inputs. Some time passes when bigger or CPU-intensive apps are opened, and there are also delays otherwise. Don't be fooled by the quad-core SoC and expect a high performance.
Display
The 5-inch screen features a resolution of 854x480 pixels (FWVGA). The TFT color display can display up to 16.7 million colors and supports multi-touch input (2 fingers). According to the manufacturer's website, the display is fat repellent. However, this is not noticeable since the screen suffers from fingerprints just like any other device.
The average brightness is 351 cd/m² and the brightness distribution is 88%. While this is a good result, it is slightly darker than the Moto G and Nexus 5. But, the black value of 0.44 cd/m² is better than the previously mentioned smartphones'. Nevertheless the contrast of the Pop C7 is lower than the two Google devices', but 798:1 is very good, anyway.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||
Brightness Distribution: 88 %
Center on Battery: 351 cd/m²
Contrast: 798:1 (Black: 0.44 cd/m²)
ΔE Color 9.86 | 0.5-29.43 Ø4.87
ΔE Greyscale 9.33 | 0.5-98 Ø5.1
Gamma: 2.19
We measured too dark red colors and too pale blue colors with our colorimeter. The ColorChecker measurements give an average DeltaE 2000 value of 9.86. This is far from the Nexus 5's (2.05) excellent result. Color temperature is also a point of critique. Just above 10,000 K means that the display is very bluish, which is also evident in the "Total Gamma."
With maximum display brightness, the device can be used reasonably well outdoors. However, the legibility suffers from extreme sunlight. You should consider buying a matte screen protector since it will reduce reflections to a minimum.
The viewing angles are not satisfactory. Of course distortions are absent if you are looking at the display head-on. But, the contrast falls and the image gets pale at other angles. In addition, the brightness falls and colors invert quickly when you are looking at the display from the right.
Performance
The One Touch Pop C7 features a quad-core SoC from MediaTek (MT6852M) with a clock rate of 1.3 GHz per core. The graphics unit is an ARM Mali-400 MP2. The RAM capacity of just 512 MB is definitely not oversized. Updating the system with the frugal Android KitKat would certainly improve performance.
Several of the synthetic benchmarks did not run. Basemark X 1.1 and Epic Citadel crashed repeatedly. While the reviewed devices only deliver slightly different results in Geekbench 3, the differences are much bigger in 3DMark 2013. The Moto G performs significantly better.
| Geekbench 3 | |
| 32 Bit Multi-Core Score (sort by value) | |
| Alcatel One Touch Pop C7 | |
| Motorola Moto G 1. Gen XT1032 | |
| LG L90 | |
| Google Nexus 5 | |
| Wiko Stairway | |
| 32 Bit Single-Core Score (sort by value) | |
| Alcatel One Touch Pop C7 | |
| Motorola Moto G 1. Gen XT1032 | |
| LG L90 | |
| Google Nexus 5 | |
| Wiko Stairway | |
| Linpack Android / IOS | |
| Multi Thread (sort by value) | |
| Alcatel One Touch Pop C7 | |
| Motorola Moto G 1. Gen XT1032 | |
| Google Nexus 5 | |
| Single Thread (sort by value) | |
| Alcatel One Touch Pop C7 | |
| Motorola Moto G 1. Gen XT1032 | |
| Google Nexus 5 | |
| 3DMark | |
| 1280x720 Ice Storm Standard Score (sort by value) | |
| Alcatel One Touch Pop C7 | |
| Motorola Moto G 1. Gen XT1032 | |
| LG L90 | |
| Wiko Stairway | |
| 1920x1080 Ice Storm Extreme Score (sort by value) | |
| Alcatel One Touch Pop C7 | |
| Motorola Moto G 1. Gen XT1032 | |
| LG L90 | |
| Wiko Stairway | |
| NenaMark2 - --- (sort by value) | |
| Alcatel One Touch Pop C7 | |
| Motorola Moto G 1. Gen XT1032 | |
| LG L90 | |
| Google Nexus 5 | |
As already mentioned above, the smartphone has some issues with several benchmarks. The Peacekeeper benchmark does not bring a result, either. The result of the Pop C7 is a mixed bag. Sometimes it can make up some positions, sometimes it loses compared to the competitors.
| Browsermark - --- (sort by value) | |
| Alcatel One Touch Pop C7 | |
| Motorola Moto G 1. Gen XT1032 | |
| LG L90 | |
| Google Nexus 5 | |
| Apple iPhone 5c | |
| Nokia Lumia 1020 | |
| Wiko Stairway | |
| Mozilla Kraken 1.0 - Total (sort by value) | |
| Alcatel One Touch Pop C7 | |
| Motorola Moto G 1. Gen XT1032 | |
| LG L90 | |
| Google Nexus 5 | |
| Nokia Lumia 1020 | |
| Wiko Stairway | |
| Octane V1 - Total Score (sort by value) | |
| Alcatel One Touch Pop C7 | |
| Motorola Moto G 1. Gen XT1032 | |
| LG L90 | |
| Google Nexus 5 | |
| Apple iPhone 5c | |
| Nokia Lumia 1020 | |
| Wiko Stairway | |
* ... smaller is better
The 4 GB flash memory is not fast. It is nearly always slower than that of the competitions. It might be a bottleneck for the entire smartphone.
| AndroBench 3-5 | |
| Random Write 4KB (sort by value) | |
| Alcatel One Touch Pop C7 | |
| Motorola Moto G 1. Gen XT1032 | |
| LG L90 | |
| Google Nexus 5 | |
| Google Nexus 4 | |
| Wiko Stairway | |
| Random Read 4KB (sort by value) | |
| Alcatel One Touch Pop C7 | |
| Motorola Moto G 1. Gen XT1032 | |
| LG L90 | |
| Google Nexus 5 | |
| Google Nexus 4 | |
| Wiko Stairway | |
| Sequential Write 256KB (sort by value) | |
| Alcatel One Touch Pop C7 | |
| Motorola Moto G 1. Gen XT1032 | |
| LG L90 | |
| Google Nexus 5 | |
| Google Nexus 4 | |
| Wiko Stairway | |
| Sequential Read 256KB (sort by value) | |
| Alcatel One Touch Pop C7 | |
| Motorola Moto G 1. Gen XT1032 | |
| LG L90 | |
| Google Nexus 5 | |
| Google Nexus 4 | |
| Wiko Stairway | |
Emissions
Temperature
The average temperatures are 34.5 °C on the front side and 35.2 °C on the rear side, according to our measurements. The maximum temperature is reached on the rear side's left, upper edge (38.5 °C). The Moto G not only remains cooler under load but also while idle. Although the Pop C7's temperature is significantly lower while idle (29.7 to 29.5 °C), it is still between 1 °C and 2 °C warmer than the competition from Motorola.
(+) The maximum temperature on the upper side is 36.9 °C / 98 F, compared to the average of 35.1 °C / 95 F, ranging from 21.9 to 63.7 °C for the class Smartphone.
(+) The bottom heats up to a maximum of 38.5 °C / 101 F, compared to the average of 33.9 °C / 93 F
(+) In idle usage, the average temperature for the upper side is 29.7 °C / 85 F, compared to the device average of 32.8 °C / 91 F.
Energy Management
Power Consumption
The Alcatel also fails to score points compared to its biggest competitor in this aspect. It gets obvious at the first glance that the power consumption is higher than the Moto G's in all scenarios. While idle it requires between 0.8 and 1.9 Watt, while the Moto G partly only needs half the energy. The differences get slightly smaller under full load. The results of the two test samples are closer here. Since power consumption directly affects battery life, the Pop C7 is in a bad position.
| Off / Standby |   0 / 0.2 Watt |
| Idle |  0.8 / 1.4 / 1.9 Watt |
| Load |
2.3 / 3.4 Watt |
    
| |
Key:
min: ,
med: ,
max: Voltcraft VC 940 | |
Battery Life
Let's first consider the battery life under full load with maximum display brightness and the CPU cores used to capacity. The Alcatel turns off after 3 hours and 48 minutes. The Moto G runs several minutes longer; however, the difference is hardly significant. We simulate the average runtime with an Internet script and dimmed display brightness. The Pop C7 has to be recharged after 9.5 hours, while the Moto G keeps running much longer (15:30 hours). The Nexus 5 also achieved a significantly longer battery life (12:14 hours). The maximum runtime is measured with minimum display brightness. No applications, only the background processes are running here. The Moto G keeps running above 11 longer, the Nexus 5 achieves more than 4 hours more, and the iPhone 5C outperforms the Alcatel by 4.5 hours.
Verdict
With the One Touch Pop C7, Alcatel tries to get a foot into the entry-level segment. This should be possible with a quad-core SoC, a 5-inch display, and high-end build quality, but it is the details that matter. Unfortunately, the display only features a low resolution (854x480 pixels) and can only be used with up to two fingers. In addition, the viewing angles are narrow and frequent crashes during CPU-intensive apps or stuttering are very annoying and finally led to a lower rating. Performance and capacity of the flash memory (4 GB) are painfully low, since the system suffers from them in many aspects. The replaceable battery, the expandable memory, and dual SIM support are pros.
You have to accept several limitations with the Pop C7 for a current street price of 149 Euros (~$204). If dual SIM support is not a crucial purchasing criterion, you should take a closer look at the competition. If you are willing to spend a few more Euros, the Wiko Stairway surely is an interesting alternative with dual SIM support.
