The 84-degree wide-angle lens captures quite a bit in the available frame. On the other hand, I thought the 8MP front-facing camera shot rather nice selfies. Some closeup shots look nice, but some exposure issues seemed to crop up in others. Mark HachmanĪ photo collage of pictures snapped with the Idol 4S. But it’s also possible that quite a bit of digital information is being left on the cutting-room floor, so to speak, degrading the images significantly. Sure, Qualcomm’s encoder may be quite efficient. I discovered that the file size of the first studio photo I shot with the 4S was just 1,345KB, versus 3,670KB for the Lumia 950 at nearly identical resolutions and identical color depths. The cameras inside the Acer Liquid Jade Primo and Idol 4S use Qualcomm’s JPG encoder. Bottom row: lamplight, first without then with flash.Īnother possible reason for the lower-quality shots may be the encoder technology. Upper row: studio lights at full and minimum brightness. Our test shots of the Alcatel Idol 4S reveal some serious weaknesses in low light. I didn’t like how the Idol S performed under low-light conditions, with or without flash. We test four lighting scenarios: studio lights at full brightness, minimum brightness, and then under lamplight with and without flash. In our photo-quality testing, the Alcatel Idol S performed fairly well, at least in full light. (To be fair, even phones with Windows Hello or a PIN require a few seconds to unlock, pushing the HP Elite x3, for example, out of contention.) I then averaged the shot times together to generate a final score. To test the time to shoot, I took pictures of a stopwatch app beginning with the phone’s screen off, measuring the difference between when I pressed the camera button and what the camera actually recorded. The camera button on the Idol 4S makes shooting photos a one-button affair. Still, as a guy who’s constantly trying to snap shots of his kids as they zoom by, the overall delay disappointed me. (In the Android version of the Idol 4S, this “Boom button” animates the weather and creates photo collages, features not available in the Windows version.) From there you can tap the button again to shoot, or adjust the settings and focus. ![]() Even with the screen off and locked, pressing the camera key triggers Microsoft’s camera app. Not all is lost, however, as there’s a middle ground: the popular camera button. There’s a pronounced camera bump on the rear of the Idol 4S. The other, unfortunately, is characteristic of some other Windows phones we’ve reviewed: When you tap the camera icon to take a picture, there’s a noticeable delay (about half a second) before the picture is actually snapped. First, the good news: its 21MP rear camera sensor (an IMX230 sensor from Sony) ensures crisp pictures. There are three things you should know about the Idol 4S camera: one positive, one negative, and another somewhere in between. The Idol 4S camera: competent, with a touch of lag Again, the Elite x3 and Idol 4S report virtually identical scores. One of the only native Windows phone benchmarks is AnTuTu, which we’ve broken out for clarity’s sake. The Idol 4S is at the top of all of them. We use a number of browser-based benchmarks (using the phone’s Edge browser) as a replacement for app-based benchmarks. As our benchmarks demonstrate, the powerful 820 chip places the Idol 4S neck-and-neck with the HP Elite x3 as the most powerful Windows phone. ![]() In daily use, I was a little surprised that I could stack and stack applications in the background without any apparent slowdown, and everything I threw at the Idol 4S ran fluidly. A few other specs favor the Windows phone: Available memory is 3.5GB, versus 3GB for Android, and the included storage is 64GB, double that of the Android version. The Android version also uses a Qualcomm octa-core Snapdragon 652 chip, while the Windows version includes the more powerful four-core Snapdragon 820. The Android version’s screen is 2560×1440 the Windows version’s is only 1920×1080. The Idol 4S’s 5.5-inch, AMOLED display is where you’ll first discover the differences between the Windows and Android versions. The metal edge of the Idol 4S serves as a bumper of sorts. ![]() Incidentally, the band extends slightly beyond the glass, offering what appears to be a degree of protection. The metal-and-glass construction of the Idol 4S looks particularly elegant, with a brass metal band sandwiched between the display glass and the plastic backing.
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