Alcatel Onetouch Idol 3 (5.5in) A big phone from a smaller name

Alcatel is a French telecoms company that’s been making budget phones since the days when we wondered why people wanted fancy features like a camera. In the smartphone era, it’s still a top-10 brand, and this latest Android model is more distinctive and luxurious than we had any right to expect.

With stereo speakers at top and bottom – or left and right when you’re watching in landscape – the Idol 3 has a symmetrical design, and can be used any way up. Shiny metal trim contrasts nicely with the brushed plastic sides and back, which only come in dark grey.

In our tests, the 13- megapixel camera worked fine for both photos and video, although others phones beat it in low-lit conditions. For a webcam, the 8-megapixel camera on the front is unusually clear. The screen goes very bright, and looks sharp with good contrast and decent colour accuracy. The battery will easily get through a full day, although it takes two-and-a-half hours to charge up again.

Performance is a little off the pace by current standards, reasonably smooth but behind budget rivals such as the revamped Motorola Moto G. The Idol 3 isn’t up to the most demanding 3D games, and more significantly we experienced some stutters in general use. Even web browsing made the phone very warm.

Given that an Android phone will only get slower over time, we can’t give the Idol 3 full marks, but it’s a good phone for the money. There’s also a smaller 4.7in version, which you can get for as little as £150 ( www. snipca.com/17800).

While it’s still quite affordable, this compact model from Ricoh is actually a proper office machine. You don’t get conveniences like Wi-fi, but with a duty cycle of 50,000 pages a month and a quoted speed of 30 pages per minute, it’s ready for hard work. It prints both sides of the paper (duplex), and its LED engine, a variation on laser technology, produceses 1200 dots per inch (dpi) for sharper textxt than the 600dpi of budget lasers.

A 1,500-page tonerer cartridge is supplied,d, which you can replaceace with 3,000 or 6,000-pagee units. Taking into account the replacementement drum that you’ll need every 20,000 pages, the cost per page works out at just 1.2p when you buy the larger cartridges.

We found text output was excellent – deep black and razor sharp, with no jagged edges. Graphics and photos looked better than we’d expect from a mono laser, despite a bit of banding and over-dark shading. As befits a workhorse model, the feed mechanism – 250-sheet paper tray and 100-sheet bypass tray that lets you load two kinds of paper at the same time – feels robust, unlike the flimsy arrangements found in cheaper printers. The 125-sheet output tray has a solid stop to prevent sheets falling off. Our only complaint was that when we used the secondary feed to print envelopes, they got creased.

The only catch with a heavy-duty printer is that it’s optimised for long runs, so printing one page takes slightly longer than with some models, at 20-25 seconds. But 100 pages were churned out in just over four minutes.