 I've actually been wanting to familiarize myself with the current crop of budget smartphones for a while. So when Alcatel reached out offering to send over a unit of their 3V, a phone so basic that it boasts US warranty as one of its noteworthy features, I couldn't resist. Especially when I noticed that this thing also has a 2160 by 1080, 18 by 9 aspect ratio display and costs only 150 bucks. Let's start with some of the things that cheesed me off about the 3V before I'd even managed to get any apps installed on it. Number one, the glass. Now, I wasn't expecting Corning glass or anything, but over the entire phone, both front and back, it is a lot more effort than I'm accustomed to to drag my finger across the glass. Now, on the back, it's not actually a big deal. In fact, I think other manufacturers, here's a Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, could learn a thing or two about making their super shiny phones a little bit less slippery to hold on to. But on the front, the sticky feeling glass has got to be the single cheapest feeling thing about this phone. And as an added bonus, it's actually harder to clean smears off of it too. So you'll spend more time kind of scrubbing away at it with your shirt compared to a Gorilla Glass phone with a better coating. Number two, the haptic motor on this thing is one of the worst that I've felt in a long time. Even ignoring the Taptic engine, Apple's fantastic haptic motor that handles 3D touch, it is like... Oh, can you guys hear that? Oh, it's like going back in time to when phones could vibrate themselves off of a table when they were ringing. And if I type too fast with the haptic feedback enabled, it actually sounds like the phone is going to fall apart. And number three, it has a USB micro B port. I mean, to be clear, that is not necessarily a huge functional disadvantage. Many modern phones have type C ports, but they still connect at USB 2 speeds anyway, and they leave out a lot of the really handy functionality that is possible with a type C port, like outputting a display port signal. It's just more fragile, which is an issue that's made worse by the 3V's lack of any, you know, fancy pants modern features like wireless charging. All right, after all that though, my impressions started getting a lot better. The 3V is lightweight, which for some people might contribute to the cheap feel, but I didn't really mind it, and the buttons, check this out. Okay, you can't really hear it, but they feel pretty clicky without being too hard to press. Also, I noticed that they included SwiftKey keyboard, which I love, and not much else. You'll find icons for Netflix and Facebook out of the box, but considering that I, and probably most people, would have downloaded those anyway, I don't really consider that to be bloat. Even the performance deficiencies aren't really visible in the traditional places. Like, it used to be that you could tell a quality unit from a basic one just by swiping left, or right, as it were. And everything from navigating between the desktops to opening up folders actually happens pretty smoothly. Even the app launch times, mind you, we're talking about web browsers and utilities here, not necessarily games, weren't noticeably bad. But, the MediaTek 8735A quad-core processor, which has four core-tex A53 cores at its heart, really shows its, uh, well, it shows its something. I wanted to say age, but was this thing even fast when it was current? Anyway, in certain tasks, like auto-rotating on even a mostly text web page, or, and this one's actually much more egregious, zooming in on a picture that you've taken to admire your handiwork, oh, oh, oh, oh, look at that! This thing feels noticeably seven or eight years ago. On that note, though, admiring your handiwork, the screen is far from terrible. It's six inches, 2160 by 1080, yes, the fancy new 18 by 9 aspect ratio, and the Alcatel website even has a prominent spot on it for the logo of their parent company, TCL, whose $400 budget TV we actually really liked in our recent review, along with some messaging about how they relied on TCL's screen expertise in order to develop the 3V's display. Now, it doesn't go as dark or as bright, so its contrast compared to some flagship tier phones, especially ones with OLED displays, is not that impressive, but it's got a non-vivid mode, which I really appreciate seeing, and for the vast majority of users, in day-to-day applications, it is unlikely to be a problem, unless you want to use it in direct sunlight outside or something along those lines, or if you want to use it to watch movies on Netflix. So, I fired up the beginning scene of Thor Ragnarok, which... Oh, oh, oh, oh, speakers are on, sorry, sorry, also this isn't the beginning scene. And it looks so dark and so low contrast, and even low res, that I was kind of taken aback, and I was prompted to send an email to Netflix, and they haven't gotten back to me, but as far as I can tell, the low resness of it anyway seems to have to do with the display not being HDR certified. So, when I watch this movie side-by-side with the Galaxy S9+, the S9, it looks so much better that even through our camera, then through your screen at home, you should be able to pretty easily see the differences in the fine details here. So, I can't figure out why it is that HDR certification, which is more of a contrasting color thing, is affecting the resolution they're serving, but it's something that I've repeated on other phones as well. Other things are handled reasonably well though, so aspect ratio controls are done either through a big list in the settings menu, or, and this is kind of cool, on the fly app-by-app with this little button right here. So, if you run into a compatibility issue with the wider or taller aspect ratio display, you can easily fix it just by clicking that button. And in general, actually, the software is not awful. Like, it's not stock Android, but whether it was a conscious decision or a cost-saving one, the Android 8.0 Oreo on this thing is pretty bare, but pretty functional. It's definitely a brighter point than the camera, which is far from the worst that I've ever seen, even on a value device, but that brighter joke, brighter point, was because it constantly underexposes my shots, and this is true of both stills and videos. Anyway, I mean, it's usable in lots of light, and it's certainly better for capturing the moment than absolutely nothing, and I always appreciate a double-click to quick-launch the camera gesture, but naturally, it lacks fancy features like image stabilization, so even though I went out of my way to grab a more modest competitor for this thing, the Honor 10, rather than like a flagship iPhone X or something, it's clearly and noticeably inferior. But inferior doesn't mean complete garbage. Its charging is a little bit slow, but the 3000 mAh battery, combined with the low-end hardware, means that over a day will be easy to achieve for most people, and NFC is missing, but dual-band Wi-Fi, which is far more important in my opinion and used to be left out of value phones like this, is present. Now, it's only got 16 gigs of storage on the $150 model, which means that you won't be installing a ton of heavy apps like games, but it's got microSD expansion, so as long as you don't load up tons of apps, at least you can store your Plex or your Netflix downloads somewhere, rather than having the phone fill up all the time and start behaving really weirdly like my mother-in-law's old 8-gig phone. I think we're pretty close to the end here. Let's see. The speaker is pretty quiet, which affects speakerphone calls and watching movies. But Cooler Master appears to have kicked off a giant OEM lupfest. But it does have a headphone jack, so there's that. And I would be floored if you get a ton of software updates, but this was enlightening for me. I'm actually really impressed at how much phone you can get for 150 bucks, even if I, like, wouldn't want to switch to it. Like, I personally, I would probably go for a contract subsidy instead, but that is not an option for everyone. 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