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Battery life
The battery life on the One Touch Idol X was surprisingly good for the 2000mAh lithium battery. Although it is slightly on the small size for a device with a 5-inch screen, the device could potentially last up to two days on one charge with careful and limited usage.
The company states the device provides 20 hours of talk time over 2G and 12 hours via 3G. The quoted standby time from Alcatel for the Idol X is 320 hours over 2G and 240 hours via 3G and this is all rather ambitious.
We didn't come near those times when reviewing the device, but it will last a solid 12 hours with medium use, and had the potential to last even longer on standby if all the additional connections like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi were deactivated.
Regardless of this, you will have to charge the phone every evening if you would like to use the Idol X to its full potential, because the battery will not last two days.
In an effort to keep the Idol X as slender as possible, the back cover of the device cannot be removed, therefore the battery is not accessible for replacement.
There is an 'Ultimate Saver' battery management app, which is also accessible from the notifications window, and the settings page. This app allows you to manage your usage and has been designed to be implemented when you are seriously low on juice.
If you find your battery life is decreasing faster than expected, you can pop over to this app to run a cut down version of the operating system which only will run the Phone, Contact, Message, Calendar, and Alarm features - along with dialling down the screens brightness automatically.
There is also a 'Saving Mode' on the Idol X which can be customized to show which settings will be enabled when the mode is activated, along with which apps are 'White Listed' and allowed to run when this setting is enabled.
If you want to see what is causing your battery to drain quickly, open up the setting app and under the battery management feature you will be able to see in order of percentage usage, which apps are using the most to the least power.
We performed a battery tested with our one and a half hour long MP4 file, which we streamed over Wi-Fi. We started with 100% capacity and left the film to play, upon returning we found the battery life had dropped to 65%.
This is to be expected as the beautiful brightly lit 5-inch screen drained over a third of our battery life in a short space of time, but the likes of the HTC One and Galaxy S4 performed better in this test.
Connectivity
There is an obvious 3G cellular connection on the Idol X, along with Wi-Fi B/G/N, Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS as soon as you take the Idol X out of the box, providing you with several different ways to connect the device to the digital world.
There is no NFC capability bundled with the device, nor is it compatible with 4G. These technologies are relatively new, and although it is not necessarily completely future proof, you wont lose too much sleep without them.
The micro USB connection is the main way to connect the device to a PC. We encountered a problem when using the Idol X with an Apple Mac, as the device was not recognized until we downloaded 'File Transfer' for Android.
Usually it is possible to connect the device as a removable storage disk, but this was not possible. Presumably this was down to the fact that this device operated solely with internal memory, as there is no ability to add additional storage with a micro SD card.
The micro USB connection found at the bottom of the Idol X doubles up as a charger and data transfer port. Once the Android File Transfer software was installed on our PC, it was a doodle to drag and drop files onto the device.
Bundled onto the device is an app called Tcast, which allows for wireless streaming of media from the Idol X to other compatible devices, for example the TV Link V100. Photos and movies can be streamed to these devices for your viewing pleasure.
