The MWC 2017 kicked-off a series of Alcatel smartphones into the market. Among them is the lower-end Alcatel U5 whose launch price is somewhere between 12,000 to 15,000 rupees while hitting the shelves in mid-March 2017.

Nice build quality but a very low-res display

Despite featuring mostly plastic, the U5 feels really good to touch but the same cannot be said of its display; though the device features an adequately sized 5.0 inches IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, its lowly 196ppi pixel density produces a rather inadequate 480p resolution.

Cameras

The smartphone features two plain camera sensors with the primary camera featuring a 5 megapixel sensor and an LED flash while the secondary features a 2 megapixel sensor.

Vastly underpowered

That’s something very typical of low-end smartphones but the advent of Xiaomi, Huawei etc. have really spoiled our habits. Featuring a 1.1 GHz quad-core processor with 1GB of RAM, the U5 will have real trouble in running the built-in Android Marshmallow. Its internal storage banks at 8 gigs while a 2050 mAh battery sums-up a pretty disappointing release from Alcatel.