Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

BARCELONA, Spain—It’s not easy for a phone to stand out when once-impressive features such as multiple cameras and sub-8mm thickness are now normal. Alcatel manages it, however, with the A5 LED by using a completely different tactic: it has a bunch of RGB LEDs that perform a light show whenever you get a notification or play music, or pretty much whenever else it has even the slightest excuse to fire them up.

Many will be instantly turned off by the design; it’s a fairly cheesy gimmick, but Alcatel has pulled it off rather well. The lights are multicolour LEDs sitting behind a frosted back cover that diffuses the light. There’s also a fine black honeycomb pattern on top of that, which further removes some of the potential for gaudiness in the concept. Grudgingly, I have to admit the Alcatel A5 LED could look a whole lot worse than it does.

These lights fire up when you get a notification, or when the phone is brought out of standby, but their behaviour is customisable too. You can tweak everything in an app called Light Show.

While there are presets for the various light actions, like acting as a light-up histogram when you play music, or forming a blue “F” when a Facebook notification arrives, you can also programme in your own patterns. This interface looks a little like the phone LED alternative of a Korg Kaoss Pad sampler, with a grid of squares that relates to LED zones on the back. There seem to be more LEDs than squares though, so users don’t appear to have direct control over every LED.

The Alcatel A5 LED cares more about injecting a bit of fun than offering a tool that lets you compose an LED son et lumière. These lights are dynamic, though: they don’t just sit there like cheap Christmas lights, but dance up and down the phone. There are presets for their motion, including such categories as “fireworks,” “meteors,” “stars,” and “rain”.

To be honest, it’s the sort of thing most people might want to see about three percent of the time. So it is reassuring to hear the lights are actually removable; users will eventually be able to replace them with something else like an extended battery pack, thereby leaving a much plainer and probably less annoying phone. When in use the LED cover stays in place using a magnetic connector, letting it hook up to the phone’s battery.

Under its attention-grabbing rear, the Alcatel A5 LED is a decent, if not quite Moto G-beating, lower-to-midrange phone. It has a 5.2-inch 720p IPS LCD screen, which is a bit disappointing when phones at a similar price are starting to feature 1080p displays.

It looks fine given the price, but you really do need to be drawn in by the LED-rave backside for this phone to make sense.

The other specs roughly match the screen. The rear camera has an eight-megapixel sensor, and the Alcatel A5 LED runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow rather than Android 7.0 Nougat. There’s a custom skin too, one with a more juvenile look than standard Android.

Processors similar to the A5 LED’s MediaTek MT6753 CPU have struggled with high-end games in 1080p phones in the past, but as this one has a 720p screen we doesn’t envision too many frame rate-related issues. The Alcatel A5 LED also has 16GB storage, expandable using microSD, and a 2,800mAh battery.

At a similar price, the Lenovo Moto G5 beats the Alcatel A5 LED on specs, but that’s no surprise as this is a quirky device with a USP, not a specs monster. In Europe the Alcatel A5 LED will cost €200, which will probably equate to about £180.

Listing image by Andrew Williams