French tech company Alcatel had announced its OneTouch Idol 3 during the Mobile World Congress event that took place in March 2015. OneTouch Idol 3 is a 5.5 inch smartphone that comes with a screen with 1080p resolution and will be taking on OnePlus One in terms of purchasing the ideal smartphone according to its price and performance metrics. The phablet sized device features Qualcomm's Snapdragon 615 SoC that is running an octa-core processor coupled with 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of expandable storage, and running Google's Lollipop 5.0.2 'out of the box'.

While the smartphone will not be able to provide a challenge to OnePlus One, due to the fact that the latter possess Qualcomm's Snapdragon 801, 3 GB of RAM and an Adreno 330 GPU, Alcatel has decided to target those smartphone consumers that like to entertain the variables of both price and performance before coming to a purchasing decision. While the base model of OnePlus One (the 16 GB variant) is only $50 higher compared OneTouch Idol 3, one of the biggest drawbacks of owning the device is that it is void of a storage slot.

OneTouch Idol 3 features a 13 MP/8 MP camera combination, compared to OnePlus One's 13 MP/5 MP combo. The French company's offering possesses a better front camera than OnePlus One's and consumers looking to snare a cheap device off of their purchase list can order a OneTouch Idol 3 through a pre-order process, which is expected to begin from April 21, 2015.

For $249, the octa-core package seems reasonable enough for those who are on a strict budget. For those who are burdened by additional financial constraints, they can always opt for Lenovo's K3 Note.