It looks like MetroPCS customers are about to get one more option to choose from. The company has announced the launch of the new Alcatel 7, a midrange phone that aims to offer excellent value for money. Specs aside, the phone seems to have a lot to offer, from a great design to relatively up-to-date software. That’s good news for those who want a phone that looks premium and has some premium features like a dual-sensor camera.
Let’s start with that design, which, as mentioned, looks very nice. On the back of the phone, you’ll find a vertically aligned dual-sensor camera, under which can be found a fingerprint sensor — and that’s about it. It’s a nice, minimalistic look, which we quite liked. On the front of the phone is a 6-inch display with what looks to be slightly rounded corners, and while it doesn’t quite look like a flagship-quality device, it still looks quite nice. The display boasts a resolution of 2160 x 1080, and an aspect ratio of 18:9.
Under the hood, the phone features a MediaTek MT6763T chipset, which is a decent chip, though decidedly midrange. The chip is coupled with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. Thankfully, the device also boasts a MicroSD card slot, through which you can expand the storage by up to 128GB.
The aforementioned dual-sensor camera boasts one 12-megapixel primary sensor and one 2-megapixel secondary sensor. The secondary sensor is really built for depth sensing, so don’t worry too much about the lower resolution. The front-facing camera comes in at 8 megapixels. Last but not least is the 4,000mAh battery, which is actually a pretty large battery and should help ensure the phone lasts at least a day on a charge.
The phone boasts a few extra features too. For example, according to Alcatel the Alcatel 7 comes with “Face Key,” which is a facial recognition system. We doubt Face Key is of a similar quality to the likes of the iPhone X, and it can probably be easily fooled, so we recommend sticking with the fingerprint sensor as much as possible. Still, Face Key may be convenient for some users.
The Alcatel 7 is available today through MetroPCS, and it costs $180 or $130 when you add a new line of service. That puts it directly against the likes of the Moto E5 Play, which we think is the best phone $100 and under.
