• Friday, February 14, 2025

Introduction


The middle class has become a luring market for those who seek a good device for not too much money. If you add modern design, good specifications and the latest firmware version to it – it can’t disappoint. Today, we have just that kind of a device, the Alcatel Shine Lite. Alongside the 5” HD display, it has excellent design which feels much more expensive, and a decent chipset to fill up the story of this device. Metal and glass body is always a good choice. 13MP rear and 5MP front facing cameras are there, but we’ll speak a bit more of them later. A big plus is the fingerprint scanner located on the back. In the package, you can find: an Alcatel charging adapter, microUSB cable, gel case, screen protection, 3.5mm in-ear headphones, and a sim tray tool. Available colors are Satin Gold, Pure White and Prime Black, which we have here for the review. Whether the Shine Lite is worth the money, let’s take a look.

Unboxing

Display


The Shine Lite has a 5” display with the resolution of 1280 x 720. It is on par with the competitors in this price range. It is an HD display which can show up to 16 million colors. The IPS LCD display promises good visibility of the sunlight. The colors are vivid, and the general feel of this display is very good. Both front and the back of the Shine Lite are protected by Asahi Dragontrail Glass. The number of PPI is 294. Touch responsiveness is very good. Visibility on the sunlight is great as well, due to the IPS panel.

Hardware and OS


Another important thing for every modern smartphone is its chipset. Because of the price, the Shine Lite doesn’t really shine in this area with the MediaTek MT6737 CPU. It is a quad-core CPU with Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.3 GHz. This chipset has become standard for the lower class, and offers a good price to performance ratio. ARM Mali-T720 MP2 is in charge of the graphics. This device performed amazingly when launching standard apps such as Facebook, Viber and Chrome, but when gaming it is really obvious that this is a lower class chipset. Overheating and fast battery consumption are evident after longer gaming. There is 16GB storage and 2GB of RAM which is just enough for fluent work and good multitasking. On the AnTuTu benchmark, it scored 28.440.Another thing which is really welcome and is indeed a great plus is definitely the fingerprint scanner. It is located on the back, works pretty fast, and represents a nice level of security. When it comes to sensors, we have: a gyroscope, a proximity sensor and a compass. This phone comes with preinstalled Android v6.0 Marshmallow firmware. Alcatel have not changed the stock Android too much, so it all works fluently and everything is only a few taps away.

Camera


When it comes to the Shine Lite’s cameras, we have a well-known combination – a 13MP sensor on the rear and a 5MP sensor of the front. Cameras have both their advantages and disadvantages. Speaking of the interface, there is plenty of room for improvement. As the basic flaw of the interface, we will point the icons which are just too little. The 13MP rear facing camera offers pretty decent results for this class. The colors could be a little more saturated, but the HDR somewhat improves the photos. Some of the camera options are: Face Detection, Geo-Tagging, ISO settings control and Auto-Focus. There is also a Dual-LED flash for low light shooting. The video is captured in HD 720p at 30fps. Taking into account that this resolution was standard way back in 2011 – it’s an obvious disadvantage. The front facing camera has 5MP resolution and it will work great for regular selfies. The picture quality is generally pretty good. Another very good thing is the LED flash on the front, which will make the Shine Lite a great choice for those who enjoy taking selfies.

Connectivity


The list of connections is also very decent for this price range. The device supports 4G, and uses a microUSB port (OTG supported) for charging and data transfer, and it is equipped with a 3.5mm headphone port.

Speaking of wireless connectivity, there are:

  • Wi-Fi 802.11
  • FM radio
  • Bluetooth v4.2
  • A-GPS

NFC would also be welcome, but this time it’s not here. This device uses nanoSIM cards. For our review we have the 5080X version, which is a DualSIM version, with a hybrid slot which can support a microSD card for storage expansion. If you want to use a microSD card however, you can only use one SIM card.
 

Battery


The device uses a non-removable Lithium-ion battery with the capacity of 2680 mAh.

Final words


The Shine Lite is a pretty good lower class device. A good display combined with a great design and a good chipset seems to be a winning combination. The lack of NFC is somewhat annulled with the Fingerprint sensor which is there. The thing that we have noticed is that the back panel is prone to scratching despite its Asashi Dragontrail Glass protection. Very slightly modified stock Android Marshmallow fits very well with the hardware, and makes it a pleasure to use the Shine Lite.

Do you like the Alcatel Shine Lite? We’d like to see your opinion in the comment section below. If you have any ideas or you would like to see a specific device being reviewed soon, feel free to let us know here or on our Facebook page. If you liked this review, subscribe to our Youtube channel, like us on Facebook, and sit back and relax while we make more of the same for you.

Alcatel Shine Lite Full Specifications
 

Video review

Advantages and disadvantages

Reasons for and against it

good display
Fingerprint scanner
LED flash on front
metal/glass combination
lacks NFS
main camera is average
back glass gets scratched easily