Our Alcatel Axel review helps you avoid extensive research and head straight to the important bits, such as the camera features and impressive battery.
The Alcatel Axel (5004R) smartphone was released in February 2021. Over the years, the budget phone market is becoming a booming business. There’s a new phone every year, including the Alcatel Axel.
Powered by a 3,500mAh battery, and a MediaTek Helio A20 processor, this entry-level phone has been a recent favorite. Its attractive price has become a major selling point amongst the masses.
However, with 2GB RAM, and only 32GB of internal storage, is it still worth the money? A phone will always have its pros and cons. We’re here to discover them and see if they hold up to our expectations.
Check out the Alcatel Axel (5004R) review for valuable details of this phone’s specifications. That way you can make a well-informed decision before buying a gadget.
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Key Specs
Alcatel Axel specifications:
- Weight: 170g
- Dimensions: 156.65 x 75.35 x 8.52mm
- OS: Android 10
- Screen size: 6-inch
- Resolution: 1440 x 720
- CPU: 1.8GHz Quad-core, MediaTek Helio A20 MTK6761D
- RAM: 2GB
- Storage: 32GB
- Battery: 3,500mAh, Non-removable
- Rear camera: 13MP
- Front camera: 5MP
Design
The Alcatel Axel smartphone features an average-looking yet sturdy build. The design doesn’t resemble the latest design trends, which come with a notch and ultra-thin bezels. We do appreciate its slimness and size. Holding the device doesn’t feel too bulky, and it fits right in the users’ palms. Just don’t expect something that looks cutting-edge.
On the front, you can see the phone’s display screen. The bezels on the right and left are thinner than the ones above and below. Additionally, the display screen doesn’t stretch from edge to edge. These are common features of most entry-level devices, giving that typical brick-design appearance.
Moving onto the back, you can find the phone’s rear camera, LED flash, and fingerprint scanner. We like the Ocean Metallic Wave color on the back cover. The phone may not come in other colors, which might be unfortunate. But the sheen and texture that comes in this available color are enough to substitute its drawbacks.
On its sides, There are the volume keys, power key, and a dedicated Google Assistant Button. All in all, everything is kept pretty minimalistic. These attributes work well with anybody who’s not looking for something too complicated. We wouldn’t expect anything too flashy from a device at this price point.
Read also: Alcatel Axel User Manual
Display
The Alcatel Axel features a 6-inch display screen. The size helps to maximize on-screen content. Despite being surrounded by slightly thick bezels, the display size gives plenty of room to engage with the screen. The 6-inch size, after all, is above average. The size works well for viewing videos, or playing games – activities that require lots of screen room. Although sometimes, it’s hard to ignore the thick bezels.
With a 1440 x 720 resolution, the display comes in HD+ and supports an aspect ratio of 18:9. These two attributes contribute to the phone’s vibrancy and strengthen its color capacity. Although it’s far from the super-sharp qualities of an AMOLED display, for example, it’s still a nice feature to add to this budget phone.
The Alcatel Axel display screen comes with helpful features like Adaptive Brightness, Night Light mode, and Dark Theme. Activate as you like as these three features offer a comfortable viewing experience for users. The display screen automatically adjusts the brightness screen to not strain the eyes too much.
For added protection, the display screen is installed with 2D Dragontrail Glass. With this coating, the chances of getting your screen damaged are immensely reduced. However, we’d still recommend adding tempered glass since it won’t protect you from drops.
Camera
The Alcatel Axel smartphone has a 13MP rear camera and a 5MP selfie camera. The 13MP rear camera is also paired with an LED flash to provide some light in dark situations. With additional features like auto-focus and image stabilization, we like the phone’s rear camera. It’s not easy to find this much resolution on budget devices.
On the other side, you have the 5MP selfie camera. Normally, we’d see 2MP for budget phone front-facing cameras. So having 5MP this time is a plus in our books. It might not be a significant improvement, but it’s a good step up. Additionally, the selfie camera has an LCD screen flash to give us some brightness. Again, this is quite rare.
Capturing HD videos is highly possible on the Alcatel Axel. The phone records videos at 1080p at 30fps. Plus, the phone accommodates video playback at the same resolution and fps. Capture high-quality videos come with absolute ease for users.
Besides the camera’s hardware, we checked out the Camera app as well. Photography enthusiasts can enjoy using Pro Mode. It will give you the freedom to play with shutter speed, exposure, aperture, and more. In addition, there’s Stop Motion Mode to create fun clips. With these tools, users can create social-ready posts straight from the camera app to the Internet.
Read also:
- AT&T Maestro Plus Review: 3GB RAM and Dual Camera On Budget
- AT&T Fusion Z Review: Huge Battery Capacity with HD+ Display
Storage
The Alcatel Axel smartphone is installed with 32GB internal storage. The amount users can access, sadly, is only approximately 20GB. This is because the phone used the remaining OS data and preloaded apps. However, you can try to delete some of these apps to gain more internal storage.
But a more effective way to add more storage is by inserting a microSD card. Fortunately, the phone can support up to 128GB of expandable storage. So you will have more room to store photos, documents, videos, and more.
Performance
The Alcatel Axel smartphone is powered by a MediaTek Helio A20 MTK6761D processor. The CPU is designed to ensure that the device runs as smoothly as possible on a low spec device. Created mainly for entry-level smartphones, the processor doesn’t have the most memorable features. But it’s good enough for casual phone usage, like browsing the Internet or connecting via phone/text.
Running at a speed of 1.8GHz, the Quad-core chipset powers the device substantially well. It accommodates the phone’s display’s resolution size. Additionally, it assigns the right amount of workload at the right frequency. This ensures that the smartphone doesn’t get too overloaded with a massive amount of data or work.
In this Alcatel Axel review, we have expected the 2GB RAM this phone offers. Typically, the higher the RAM, the more work the phone is able to undertake. However, this is a budget phone, and 2GB seems to be reasonable in our opinion. It ensures you have enough space to store temporary data and do multitasking.
As expected, the 2GB RAM has some drawbacks. Considering how sophisticated apps are developed these days, budget phones may not be able to get the most of these features. All because of the limited RAM. However, there are some ways to leverage this. One of them is by continuously clearing the cache to free up RAM space.
The Alcatel Axel is supported with Android 10 as its Operating System (OS). The Google-based OS is known for its simplicity, good UI, and speedy performance. In this version, users will get a dedicated Google Assistant, which makes doing tasks much quicker and faster. There are also a couple of useful add-ons, like dark mode and digital wellbeing features.
Lastly, the Alcatel Axel has facial recognition and fingerprint scanners. These two features give users the ability to enhance the phone’s security. On top of that, it simply makes it easier to unlock and do a certain task with the device. But like most scanners, the initial configuration will take some time to recognize our biometrics.
Onto the more technical aspects, the smartphone has an accelerometer, GPS, proximity, light, and E-Compass sensors. All these sensors work together to provide a high level of responsiveness for the device. We like how this phone has almost everything to give the ultimate user experience. Considering the price, Alcatel Axel gives more value than what you pay for.
Connectivity
The Alcatel Axel smartphone can connect to 3G, 4G, and 4G LTE It supports everything, although we recommend 4G for the fastest connection. Make sure that a Nano SIM card is installed on the phone beforehand. As an alternative, you can use the Wi-Fi connection to save some data. Additionally, the smartphone accommodates Wi-fI Calling with the right amount of connection and speed.
Other connectivity features include Bluetooth Version 5.0, FM Radio, and Mobile Hotspot. You can practically connect most of our external wireless devices like speakers or headphones. To charge the device, the phone uses a USB Type-C. This port is commonly available in a lot of budget devices now so we think it’s no longer something special.
Battery
The Alcatel Axel is powered by a 3,500mAh non-removable battery. With a huge capacity, the phone can withstand long hours of usage. Depending on what connection you’re using (e.g. 4G LTE, 3G), the phone lasts up to 8.75 days on standby. For talk-time, it can last for 17 hours.
Unfortunately, fast charging is unavailable on the device. Charging time is typical. To add battery life, you can easily optimize battery usage thanks to its built-in Smart Manager. With these features, you can reduce the number of times we have to charge the device.
Is the Alcatel Axel a good phone?
The Alcatel Axel has proved that a budget phone can come with advanced features. While it may have a lackluster design, the specifications will satisfy many budget-conscious consumers. It has a steady processor, great display qualities, and abundant camera settings. In short, it is an affordable and reliable phone.
At the retail price of $49, it’s safe to conclude in this Alcatel Axel review that this device is a steal. No matter how modern devices get, great phones should always be accessible to various demographics. However, as you have read in our explanation above, be aware of both strengths and weaknesses of the phone.
Alcatel Axel Pros
- Large display
- Good camera
- Good battery capacity
- Fingerprint and Face Unlock
Alcatel Axel Cons
- Low internal storage
- Small RAM