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Battery life
- 4,000mAh battery with fast charging
- Easily lasts a whole day on a single charge
With its 4,000mAh battery, the Alcatel A7 offers a surprising amount of stamina for a device in this price bracket.
How much usage you'll get off a single charge obviously depends on your own smartphone habits, but after a day of browsing the web, taking photos, playing games and watching movies, we found the A7 still had plenty of juice left in the tank; in fact, we were able to get through roughly half of the following day, too.
If you're sick of your smartphone running out of power before you even get home, then you'll have no complaints with this device.
In our battery test - where an HD clip is played for 90 minutes at full screen brightness – the Alcatel A7 shed 12 percent of its battery life.
Despite not having a Snapdragon chipset – and thereby missing out on Qualcomm's Quick Charge standard – the A7 does feature fast charging support.
From an empty battery it took around an hour and forty-five minutes to reach the full charge, but if you're looking for a quick top-up before you leave the house, then 15 to 30 minutes connected to the wall charger should do the trick.
Despite the presence of a removable back cover, the Alcatel A7's battery cannot be replaced by the end user – which is something of a missed opportunity, if you ask us.
With people holding onto their handsets for longer these days, the ability to fit a new power cell would have made the phone even more appealing to mid-range buyers.
Camera
- 16-megapixel rear-facing camera with 1080p video
- 8-megapixel front-facing selfie cam with LED flash
The Alcatel A7 comes equipped with a 16MP rear camera with a wide f/2.0 aperture.
Electronic Image Stabilization is also featured – the superior Optical Image Stabilization is perhaps a little out of this price range – and the Phase Detect Auto Focus system is reasonably nippy.
A dual-tone LED flash lights up darker shots. For selfies, the 8MP front-facing camera works well enough, although skin tones look a little bleached out, especially when the front-facing LED flash is deployed.
Still, this feature does at least make taking selfies in darkened rooms possible, if you absolutely have to have that kind of thing.
The rear-facing camera supports HD recording at 1080p, 30fps – despite 4K making its way onto other budget-level blowers like the Xiaomi Redmi 5, it's not present here.
Both photo and video quality are average rather than stunning; there's a lot of compression present on still images, and we've seen better HD footage. Low-light shooting is also somewhat lackluster.
The phone's camera software is pretty basic, but does come with some nice extras, such as a panoramic mode, time-lapse recording and the ability to create collages as you take the photos.
The only genuine annoyance is that HDR has to be manually toggled on and off, and isn't deployed automatically, as is the case on many other phones.
In summary, the camera on the A7 isn't going to scoop any awards, but it will be entirely adequate for most users. It's fast to capture and the resultant images look fine on your phone's screen, provided you don't scrutinize them too carefully.
