Micromax Canvas 4 A210 Review

Micromax, with a lot of hype and a little bit of disappointing specs launched its latest flagship, Canvas 4 on July 8. One of the major things that everyone witnessed was that people had shown a lot of trust towards this Indian brand with a whooping number of 11500 pre-bookings while having the specs and final product price secret. The product does look promising with the features it packs in and the premium feel.

Hardware

The phone is 8.9 mm thick and feels good while holding in hand. The anodized aluminium rim running along the sides of the phone adds more richness. The rim is also supposed to feature as an antenna to improve the signal quality and that has been proved when Canvas HD and Canvas 4 were checked in the basement of a building for network strength of the same carrier and found Canvas 4 having a stronger network based on bars shown by the phone. The device is available in White as well as Grey color. The brushed finish on the back is an add on to the beauty and on Grey color it appears more prominently. The gadget features a High Definition display which is absolutely crisp and vivid but 1080p display could have done a superb job.  On protection front, the Canvas 4 is provided with Corning Gorilla glass 2 which resists scratches to a huge extent and a bonus in the package. Phone has a 13 MP rear camera capable of shooting 1080p videos with 5 lenses built in and a Sony sensor. Secondary camera is a wide angel 5 MP shooter and delivers good image quality as well as video quality during a video call. It encompasses a dual color notification LED which won’t let you miss a notification on your phone. Dissection of the device exhibits disappointment with the same one year old MediaTek MT6589 quad core processor clocked at 1.2 GHz. 1 GB RAM is further disappointment, though normal application usage and gaming did not get affected much in day-to-day usage. 16 GB ROM was an expected and much needed hardware requirement and has been fulfilled by Micromax. Phone bears a 2000 mAh battery which lasted for around 14-16 average hours even on aggressive usage. Dual SIM card slots allows you to manage your work and personal connections with a swift. 3.5 mm jack on the top enhances the universal support for the headsets from a  variety of brands.

Software

The device is blessed with the goodness of the Google’s Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean operating system which is more or less the latest one. Existence of Project Butter could be experienced while using the phone. The user interface is much of stock feel and very less customizations have been done by Micromax. The phone is though loaded with some of the premium features offered by high end phones in the market. Smart Gesture part of the settings include features such as Upside silent, Upside speaker, Proximity answer phone and Proximity dial phone. All these features perform to their best in the usage. Another gesture feature that is added in the Video Player that of Pause on Look Away which doesn’t work to the expectations and worked only three times out of ten incidences. Pinning video player works great and without any lag while you have your mail getting checked or the twitter timeline being read. Filling your screen half with browser seems to work just fluid and gives you the freedom of having any other application open in the other half unlike Multi Window of Samsung where limited applications are supported. Music player has been completely transformed into a new avatar and features a round dial like panel and seek bar running through the periphery. Added visualization also worked fine. The music player has also got a new widget and the notification toggle. Settings panel remains somewhat the same with no categorization of the options but a new set of icons cannot be over overlooked.  This time Micromax seems to have worked more on software front than that of the hardware and the yield is Blow to Unlock which is powered by Foneclay. Though the principle behind this unlock feature is not very special but yes, it has been brought up for the first time. Blow to unlock feature uses microphone for an input. Unlocking worked alright for eight out of ten times and the rest two times it unlocked without any blow or shake. Camera interface remained almost same as the previous but added vertical panorama is a fantastic feature and stitching is just perfect. M!Security application is powered by NQ Mobile and allows you to use Anti Theft feature very efficiently. Overall software is smooth and premium to use.

Final Verdict

Micromax Canvas 4 A210 is packed with ton of software tweaks and promising hardware but pricing of Rs. 17999 is a bit higher for comparatively lower specifications. We think, Canvas 4 is a real good device but not really worth an upgrade for existing Canvas HD users.