By Charlemagne Losaria
The Alcatel Shine Lite is positioned for the budget crowd in mind and aims to help Alcatel get a bite in the mid-range pie. Let?s have a closer look at this new Alcatel smartphone.
Design
Alcatel must have hired new designers as their recent offerings of mid-range smartphones certainly are turning heads on a design standpoint. No different is the Alcatel Shine Lite.
The Alcatel Shine Lite is built on a metallic frame sandwiched by 2.5D Asahi Dragon Glass panels, both on the front and back. The handy device measures at just 7.5mm thick but is quite heavy for a 5-incher. Overall it feels very solid to the grip, thanks to the chamfered edges.
Up front, it features a notification LED light, a chrome-grilled earpiece, a 5MP front-facing snapper and an ambient light sensor at the top. The left edge houses the hybrid SIM/microSD slot while the right edge features the power button and volume buttons.
Down below are somewhat huge lit capacitive keys. While I appreciate it being lit, on a personal standpoint, it isn’t my cup of tea as I find the keys huge for the size of a phone. Good thing the white version of the Shine Lite conceals it well especially when not activated. However, there is no way to turn the key lights off. The Shine Lite has a down firing mono speaker.
Flip it over and you’ll be greeted with the programmable fast-finger scanner, the 13MP Camera with dual-tone LED flash the Alcatel logo, and ?Shine? marking below.
Display
The device has a 5-inch display with a screen resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels. It produces colors very well and has wide viewing angles. It also has a built-in ambient sensor to help adjust screen brightness based on the surrounding environment. The display is bright enough and also quite legible even on outdoors.
Performance
The Alcatel Shine Lite sports a Mediatek chipset MT6737 paired with a quad-core 1.3Ghz CPU, along with an ample 2GB of RAM and 16GB built-in storage. It’s not a powerhouse combination, given that this is a mid-range phone, but it does get the job done for the most part.
Using this phone for a couple of days, I found that light tasks are not a problem with the Shine Lite. Light tasks like texting, taking photos, watching videos on YouTube and using social media apps like Facebook and Instagram is a fairly good experience. App switching also posed no problem for the Shine Lite.
You will, however, experience occasional lags after opening so many apps and won’t be able to play popular high definition games as you might like, too. It?s quite ideal for those who aren’t so much into gaming and not power users.
Like most phones nowadays, the Alcatel Shine Lite ships with the now slowly aging Android Marshmallow out of the box.
Camera
For the camera, the Shine Lite sports a 13MP Camera with dual tone rear flash and a 5MP front camera with LED front flash, which is a fairly decent resolution for a selfie smartphone.
Some nifty features were added by Alcatel like the ability to capture shots via a V sign gesture, and a camera mode called ?Split Catcher? which allows users to capture and stitch photos captured by both the rear and front camera. There is also a dedicated ?Selfie Album? for photos captured using the front camera. Other modes includes HDR, Night Mode, and Panorama.
The 13MP rear camera is pretty solid in well-lit conditions like outdoors but sometimes struggles to focus and get sharp photos in low-light environments. Below are unedited sample shots from the Shine Lite:
Connectivity
The Alcatel Shine Lite has a hybrid microSD and dual SIM slot — an emerging trend in newer smartphones. Users can choose whether to have two SIMs or one SIM and a microSD. The phone support LTE Cat4 technology as well as FM radio and GPS.
Battery
The Shine Lite has a non removable 2460 mAh battery which should last you a day on regular usage.
The verdict
The Shine Lite is definitely one of the better designed mid-ranger below P10,000.00 in my opinion. It doesn’t have anything new that will blow you away but it does look very premium for the price you?re paying. It has a fast fingerprint scanner, decent camera on well-lit conditions, and a front firing LED flash for selfies.
However, in terms of price to specs ratio, it may not be worth your hard-earned money, not at least they decide to lower the price a little bit. It looks very good, I will give it that, but there are better performers for lesser price out in the market.
