If Amazon's $30 price cut to Alcatel OneTouch Idol 3 wasn't a big enough drop for some consumers to pick up the Android Marshmallow smartphone, the e-commerce giant is discounting the price even more. Previously priced at $170, the 4.7-inch OneTouch Idol 3 is now on offer for $150.
This latest price cut comes just two months after Amazon chipped $30 off the phone's $200 price tag, and about a month before the smartphone marks its first birthday — it launched August of last year.
The OneTouch Idol 3's most important spec to a lot of potential buyers will be its cellular support. It's fully compatible with AT&T's network and has partial support for 4G on T-Mobile but is completely incompatible with the nation's no. 1 and no. 2 networks, namely Verizon and Sprint.
For AT&T subscribers and T-Mobile customers who do not care all that much about cellular data and 4G, the OneTouch Idol 3 may offer a lot of bang for $150.The phone has a 4.7-inch display that outputs a resolution of 720 x 1,280 pixels, giving it a screen-to-body ratio of 68.7 percent, which is about the same as last year's $290 HTC One M9, and a pixel density of 312 pixels per inch.
The OneTouch Idol 3 is powered by an economy Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 and a capable Adreno 306 graphics processing unit. The single-SIM model discounted at $150 is stocked with 1.5 GB of RAM and 8 GB of storage space, which can be expanded by up to 256 GB via the phone's microSD slot.
For photos, the phone has a 13-megapixel rear camera that's capable of recording 1,080p video at 30 frames per second. And it has a 5-megapixel selfie camera that's also able to capture 1,080p video.
The smartphone has a 2,000 mAh non-removable lithium ion battery and a standard set of sensors that includes an accelerometer, proximity sensor and compass. However, this budget phone is missing a gyroscope and that could be a downer for fans of Google Cardboard.
Though the OneTouch Idol 3 comes with Android 5.0 Lollipop stock, users can upgrade the phone to Android 6.0 Marshmallow. It's unclear if the phone will get Google's next OS, the still-code-named Android N.
For those looking for more horsepower than that, Alcatel is getting ready to launch the OneTouch 4s soon — it has been branded the Vodafone Smart platinum 7. It's still a budget phone, though considerably more powerful than the OneTouch Idol 3.
