BARCELONA—LG says "play more," but if you want to play around at Mobile World Congress this year, get hold of an Alcatel A5 LED. This midrange smartphone combines a dash of Motorola's modular back concept with pulsing lights and pumping bass, making for a fun, unusual party phone.
I'll get to the basic specs in the minute, but the point of the A5 LED is its removable back accessories. There are three. The first is a grid of colored LED lights, eight by four, that change color and behavior based on things happening on your phone. You can use a built-in app to theme them to complement your clothing, or have them react as a visualizer for your music.
If you insist on being serious, the LEDs can also pop up patterns for different kinds of messages and different callers, for instance, flashing red when you get a message from your boss, or green for a text from your significant other.
It's silly and useful and fun. It reminds me of a really old Nokia phone, the 3220, which had rubber bumpers with pulsing disco lights. The A5 LED is going to be inexpensive, too, although Alcatel didn't give me a price at our MWC briefing. While other manufacturers compete with shimmery, serious phones, the A5 is purely for the inner (and outer) teen.
Back to Backs
There are two other backs, too. One of them is a big speaker with a kickstand. It's made of white plastic, and is an oval that sticks out from the back of the phone. It's like a discount version of Moto's JBL speaker mod, and sounds like one, too: loud but not as rich. The third back is an unusually slim 3,000mAh battery.
I've been doing this for many years now. I get bored. This phone is not boring. It's not boring and it's not expensive, and you don't see those two things together too often.
As for the specs, the A5 has a 5.2-inch 720p LCD, an octa-core Mediatek MT6753 processor, and "Android 6.0," which Alcatel said might change in the US model, although it offered me no guarantees. (Here's to hoping for Android 7.1.) It has 8MP and 5MP cameras that record 1080p video, 16GB of storage and a microSD card slot, 2GB of RAM, and a 2,800mAh battery. Alcatel will probably create a version for any US carrier that wants one—that's the company's general strategy.
But That's Not All
Alcatel spun out a bunch of other products here at MWC, but none are as entertaining as the A5 LED. The Plus 12 is a Windows 10-powered 2-in-1 laptop, but it has a slow Celeron N3350 processor and likely won't appear in the US. It's technically interesting because the keyboard essentially has a low-end smartphone in it to connect the laptop to LTE networks, but that's just a curiosity.
The U5 and A3 are basic smartphones, like Alcatel's Pop series, and may pop up on prepaid carriers.
But the A5 LED is clearly the breakout. If it's handled well by a prepaid carrier in the US—like Boost, for instance—it could be a thriller. If you live in a city with public transportation, expect to see a lot of kids hanging out by train doors with pulsing disco lights on the back of their phones.