Alcatel A3 10 Big screen on a budget
Though better than other budget variants, the tablet is still under-powered, writes Khalid Anzar
Alcatel, backed by Chinese electronics company TCL, launched the A3 10 tablet a few months ago, with 4G LTE connectivity and voice calling support, at a price of ~9,999. The tab is one of the few offering a SIM slot for calling and data access.
The A3 10 has a mammoth 10.1-inch IPS HD display with multitouch support. I liked the sharp colours that didn’t fade, even in direct sunlight. But the viewing angles aren’t great, and there is a noticeable shift in colours when the screen is looked at from a certain angle.
A thickness of 8.95mm makes this tab comfortable to hold. But, at 465 gm, it is on the heavier side and I had pain in my wrists after holding it for a long time to watch videos.
The Alcatel A3 10 has a decent fivemegapixel (MP) camera at the rear and a 2MP camera on the front. Both work fine for video calling and taking random pictures for social media sharing. The rear camera takes satisfactory images with decent detail and colour tone in daylight. But in low-light conditions, the camera tends to shoot blurry images with noticeable noise levels.
The quad-core processor at 1.1 GHz led to average performance, and I experienced noticeable lags sometimes, especially while multi-tasking. The device comes with 16 GB of internal storage, expandable to up to 128 GB via microSD, and 2GB of RAM. It runs Android 7.0 out of the box, with some bloatware. Though there is support for the 4G LTE network, the tablet does not support VoLTE services, so it is not compatible with Reliance Jio. In terms of battery, the tab has a 4,600 mAh one, which runs for more than half a day.
The Alcatel A3 10 is an under-powered entry-level tablet, with a few goodies like voice calls and SIM-based data services thrown in. To its credit, it is better than other tablets in the budget range and works fine on most fronts.