The Alcatel Idol 4 and Idol 4S were released over a
year ago at Mobile World Congress. Their successors, the Idol 5 and Idol 5S
will be launched at IFA Berlin next week. Details of both devices have showed
up online.
The Idol 5S sports a nearly identical design to that
of the Idol 4S. The main difference is the design of the front facing speakers
which now have fewer but larger holes. We presume that change applies to the
speakers at the back too. The forehead and chin are still thick though, so even
with a 5.2-inch screen, it will be big.
The Idol 5S also features the Boom Key, below the
volume rocker which can be used to fire up the camera, as a shutter button or
turn on the volume boost. Power button and SIM tray are on the left. The Idol
5S (6060) will launch in two variants. One will be powered by a MT6757CH SoC
(Helio P25) and the other will feature the popular Snapdragon 625. Both
variants have been seen on GFXBench and differ with respect to processors, RAM,
camera features, NFC, and version of Android they are running.
The Idol 5S will have a 5.2-inch full HD display,
3GB of RAM for the Snapdragon model and 2GB RAM for the Mediatek model. Both
variants have 32GB of built-in storage. On the rear sits a 12MP camera with LED
flash and up in front is an 8MP camera. The Mediatek and Qualcomm chips are
both octa-core SoCs using the Cortex A53 cores. The Helio P25 is clocked at
2.3GHz and has a Mali-T880 GPU while the SD625 is clocked at 2.0GHz and sports the Adreno 506
The rear camera on the Snapdragon variant can record
in 4K but that info is missing from the Helio P20 variant. So while the pixel
count are the same on both devices, the sensors may be different. The Mediatek
variant however has the advantage of having NFC.
Both phones run Nougat but the MediaTek variant is
Android 7.0 and the Snapdragon model runs Android 7.1.1 The only detail missing
for the Idol 5S is the battery capacity. The price of the Mediatek variant of
the Idol 5S is said to be 399 Euros (US$ 476).
