Alcatel lights up MWC with its LED phone. Quite Literally.

In a move to stand out in the smartphone crowd, Alcatel, the Chinese subsidiary of TCL Corporation just unveiled an interesting smartphone in the form of A5 LED at MWC in Barcelona.

What's exciting about the Alcatel A5 LED is its rear panel which has an arrangement of LEDs that lights up to give you notifications, play games or simply act as your music visualiser. The company has provided an app that enables users to customise the functioning of the LED back. The LED cover can be taken off and be replaced with the 3,000 mAh battery cover which provides additional juice to the phone and then there is a speaker back cover as well.

Now, these swappable back covers are in no way like the Moto Mods but rather a cheaper alternative as they lack both the quality and specs.

The A5 LED doesn't boast of high-end hardware and as such comes with a 5.2-inch HD IPS display and is powered by an octa-core MediaTek MT6753 processor clocked at 1.5GHz. There is 3GB RAM and 32GB onboard storage to get you through the basic usage.

Alcatel A5 LED comes with a 13-megapixel rear and a 5-megapixel front facing camera. Additionally, it has the basic set of sensors and communication modules.

The Alcatel A5 LED is powered by a 2,800 mAh battery. The device runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

Alcatel also launched a bunch of other affordable smartphones namely, the A3, A3 XL and the U3.

The Alcatel A3 features a 5-inch HD IPS panel and is powered by a 1.25GHz clocked quad-core Mediatek MT6737 chipset along with 1.5GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. The device comes with a 13-megapixel rear and 5-megapixel front snapper. Surprisingly, the Alcatel A3 has a rear fingerprint sensor. The device draws power from a 2,460 mAh battery.

The A3 XL is similar to the normal A3 but comes with a larger 6-inch IPS display and 3,000 mAh battery but a lesser 1GB RAM and 8GB internal storage.

The Alcatel U3 is a low-end budget phone which has a 5-inch FWVGA (854x480 pixels) display and is powered by a quad-core Mediatek CPU along with 1GB RAM and 8GB of storage.

Apart from these smartphones, Alcatel went on to launch a Windows 2-in-1 tablet which it's calling the PLUS 12. As evident, the PLUS 12 features an 11.6-inch full HD IPS display.

The device runs on Windows 10 and is powered by Intel's Celeron N3350 processor coupled with 4GB of RAM and 64GB onboard storage. The PLUS 12 comes with a fingerprint sensor, USB-C port along with USB-A port and micro-HDMI.

There's an additional keyboard dock which gives the tablet some major enhancements as it houses the SIM card slot and connectivity modules. The keyboard has its own battery capacity of 2,580 mAh. The PLUS 12 metal casing makes for a rather thin 7.9 mm footprint.

Source: Alcatel lights up MWC with its LED phone. Quite Literally.