Friday, 2 August 2013
Canvas 4 Review: The Best Micromax Yet - But Does That Justify The Price?
No
phone has created as much buzz in the last month as the Micromax Canvas
4. My brief hands-on at the event was enough to make a good impression -
especially considering I'm a user of its predecessor, the Canvas HD -
but you can't really tell much from that. After having spent a good
amount of time with it, it's clear that the Canvas 4 is the best the
company has to offer right now, but you can't help but feel it's ever so
slightly more than the sweet spot of 'value for money'.
What Is It?
The Canvas 4 is Micromax's (MMX) new flagship smartphone, boasting a 5-inch HD 720p touchscreen with Gorilla Glass protection, 1.2GHz quad-core Mediatek MTK6589 (Cortex A7) processor, 1GB RAM, 13MP camera, 5MP front cam, 2000mAh battery and Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean. MMX has thrown in some special software features too, inspired by what Samsung and others have done. And all for a price of Rs. 17,999.
Who's It For?
People who want a high-performance smartphone without spending more for brand value. People who want a good-looking handset with all the works.
Design
The Canvas 4 actually has a lot of design oomph and immediately drew eyeballs whenever I took it out of my pocket. Most people were surprised that it was a Micromax product. Those aluminium bands around it (which double up as radio and Wi-Fi antennas), the high-grade plastic back (removable to replace battery) and the flat glass front (with capacitive buttons that appear only when you switch it on) come together to make it look like a premium device... from a distance.
Hold it in your hand and the little flaws start getting annoying. The finishing is poor, with the back cover not sitting flush with the phone, so you can see little gaps. The speakers at the back and the earpiece at the front have rough edges that scrape against your fingers every once in a while. Then there are the metal buttons, which feel flimsy and don't inspire much confidence in how long they'll last -- a problem that has been common with most Micromax devices we have used.
What Is It?
The Canvas 4 is Micromax's (MMX) new flagship smartphone, boasting a 5-inch HD 720p touchscreen with Gorilla Glass protection, 1.2GHz quad-core Mediatek MTK6589 (Cortex A7) processor, 1GB RAM, 13MP camera, 5MP front cam, 2000mAh battery and Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean. MMX has thrown in some special software features too, inspired by what Samsung and others have done. And all for a price of Rs. 17,999.
Who's It For?
People who want a high-performance smartphone without spending more for brand value. People who want a good-looking handset with all the works.
Design
The Canvas 4 actually has a lot of design oomph and immediately drew eyeballs whenever I took it out of my pocket. Most people were surprised that it was a Micromax product. Those aluminium bands around it (which double up as radio and Wi-Fi antennas), the high-grade plastic back (removable to replace battery) and the flat glass front (with capacitive buttons that appear only when you switch it on) come together to make it look like a premium device... from a distance.
Hold it in your hand and the little flaws start getting annoying. The finishing is poor, with the back cover not sitting flush with the phone, so you can see little gaps. The speakers at the back and the earpiece at the front have rough edges that scrape against your fingers every once in a while. Then there are the metal buttons, which feel flimsy and don't inspire much confidence in how long they'll last -- a problem that has been common with most Micromax devices we have used.
Using It
Overall,
the Canvas 4 is a wonderfully smooth experience. The 'blow-to-unlock'
is a disaster, and I'll expand on that soon, but it's a small aside that
can quickly be taken care of by replacing it with another Lock Screen
utility from the Play Store. Once you get past that, the phone performs
incredibly well.
Multi-tasking
with plenty of apps was smooth, every game from Dead Trigger to N.O.V.A
3 ran perfectly, and it was overall a breeze. The built-in software
tweaks Micromax has thrown in -- like antivirus and the
custom music player -- are nice additions, but the gesture-based tweaks
are atrocious. For instance, the video-pinning feature that will
play/pause a video when you're looking away from the phone keeps pausing
videos even when you are sitting at a slight angle. It's annoying and
best to disable all these gesture-activated tweaks. Unfortunately, like
most such pre-installed software, you can replace them but can't
uninstall them completely unless you root the phone.
I
was particularly happy with the call quality and reception of the
phone. There were no call drops at all and I actually managed to get
network in an area where only the Nokia Lumia handsets and premium Android phones have worked fine. One of the oft-repeated complaints with Micromax phones is call quality and the Canvas 4 one finally addresses the issue.
The Best Part
Oh Gorilla Glass, how I missed thee! Those 'hardened glass' and 'one glass solution' and other such knock-offs don't hold a candle to the premium standard in touchscreen protection. Just to be sure, I took a key and tried to scratch the glass, but it stayed without any blemishes.
I
said this in my hands-on as well. I would happily give up the bragging
rights of a 1080p FullHD display for the ease and convenience of Gorilla
Glass. The fact that you can afford to be a little more free with how
you use your handset -- not worrying about it getting scratched -- is
worth the extra moolah the Canvas 4 demands.
Tragic Flaw
A
lot had been made of the "Blow to Unlock" feature of the Canvas 4,
where you can blow on the lock from a distance. I can't begin to tell
you how much of a disaster the unlocking process is.
First,
the blowing is inconsistent -- if you blow too lightly, it won't work;
and if you blow in certain spots, it won't work. Hold the phone under a
fan and it'll unlock. The alternative noted on the lock screen is 'shake
to unlock', which is unbelievably annoying to use -- again, it needs to
be shaken in a certain way. The regular 'slide-to-unlock' feature is
gone and it took me 4 days to accidentally discover that keeping a
finger pressed on the lock icon for a few seconds will unlock it. And
perhaps most disastrously, you can hit the capacitive Home button to
instantly unlock the phone -- so basically, it's not locked!
If
you do buy this phone, make sure the first thing you do is to remove
this atrocious lock system and replace it with almost anything else you
can find in the Android app store.
Test Notes
-If you ask me, screens can make or break the phone experience, and the Canvas 4 is a winner. Forget the FullHD resolution, it's colour reproduction that matters more. Unlike previous smartphones, the colours aren't washed out -- they're vibrant. I put the Canvas 4 next to a Galaxy S3, Galaxy Grand, HTC One and the LG Optimus G, and it held its own. It's not quite as rich as the AMOLED and SLCD screens, but the Canvas 4 has nothing to be ashamed of. Going back to my Canvas HD felt like a major disappointment.
-On average, you can expect the Micromax Canvas 4 to take you through one work day. In our tests, we found that it lasted for approximately 14 hours when used with 3G and GPS on, auto-brightness, about an hour and a half of music playback, two YouTube videos,
2 hours of phone calls, interspersed with lots of social networking, casual multiplayer gaming, and constant Whatsapp usage.
Not bad at all - and you should be able to get a little more juice out of it if you switch sensors on and off wisely. However, one should note that like most Android phones, the battery drains faster if you're connected to Wi-Fi.
-If you ever needed proof that megapixels don't matter as much as a camera's sensor itself, the Canvas 4 will make a case. Forget the '13 megapixel' tag - the shots you get are absolutely the same as those from the Canvas HD, which means they're good in broad daylight, but otherwise you're going to get images with grain and noise. It also tends to have a blooming effect with sunlight and yellow bulbs, but not so much with neon lights. The one upside is that images shot in the dark are actually usable, unlike most other phones in this category -- I can't be sure about the reason for this, but I'm chalking it up to a better flash.
-16GB of internal memory (of which 10.4GB is available to the user) is a fantastic addition that hasn't been talked up enough, in my opinion. You'll virtually never get that "Running low on memory" message that most budget Android owners have gotten used to now.
-I loved that the Canvas 4 came with flat cables for the microUSB connector-cum-charger and the headphones, which are generally better quality and tend to not get tangled easily.
-That said, the audio quality itself leaves a lot to be desired. The sound is muffled and fuzzy, and I suspect Micromax has artificially boosted the bass output; the balance was all wrong. If Freddie Mercury could hear how Bohemian Rhapsody sounds on the Canvas 4, he'd roll over in his yet-to-be-discovered grave.
-Don't get caught up in all the talk of it being an 'aluminium-wrapped' phone. Most of the phone is plastic and feels like it.
-If you ask me, screens can make or break the phone experience, and the Canvas 4 is a winner. Forget the FullHD resolution, it's colour reproduction that matters more. Unlike previous smartphones, the colours aren't washed out -- they're vibrant. I put the Canvas 4 next to a Galaxy S3, Galaxy Grand, HTC One and the LG Optimus G, and it held its own. It's not quite as rich as the AMOLED and SLCD screens, but the Canvas 4 has nothing to be ashamed of. Going back to my Canvas HD felt like a major disappointment.
-On average, you can expect the Micromax Canvas 4 to take you through one work day. In our tests, we found that it lasted for approximately 14 hours when used with 3G and GPS on, auto-brightness, about an hour and a half of music playback, two YouTube videos,
2 hours of phone calls, interspersed with lots of social networking, casual multiplayer gaming, and constant Whatsapp usage.
Not bad at all - and you should be able to get a little more juice out of it if you switch sensors on and off wisely. However, one should note that like most Android phones, the battery drains faster if you're connected to Wi-Fi.
-If you ever needed proof that megapixels don't matter as much as a camera's sensor itself, the Canvas 4 will make a case. Forget the '13 megapixel' tag - the shots you get are absolutely the same as those from the Canvas HD, which means they're good in broad daylight, but otherwise you're going to get images with grain and noise. It also tends to have a blooming effect with sunlight and yellow bulbs, but not so much with neon lights. The one upside is that images shot in the dark are actually usable, unlike most other phones in this category -- I can't be sure about the reason for this, but I'm chalking it up to a better flash.
-16GB of internal memory (of which 10.4GB is available to the user) is a fantastic addition that hasn't been talked up enough, in my opinion. You'll virtually never get that "Running low on memory" message that most budget Android owners have gotten used to now.
-I loved that the Canvas 4 came with flat cables for the microUSB connector-cum-charger and the headphones, which are generally better quality and tend to not get tangled easily.
-That said, the audio quality itself leaves a lot to be desired. The sound is muffled and fuzzy, and I suspect Micromax has artificially boosted the bass output; the balance was all wrong. If Freddie Mercury could hear how Bohemian Rhapsody sounds on the Canvas 4, he'd roll over in his yet-to-be-discovered grave.
-Don't get caught up in all the talk of it being an 'aluminium-wrapped' phone. Most of the phone is plastic and feels like it.
Should I Buy It?
At a price of Rs. 18,000, the Canvas 4 does appear a little over-priced when you consider its competitors have FullHD screens (like the Spice Pinnacle HD or the Wickedleaks Wammy Z+) while the Canvas HD itself retails at Rs. 5,000 lesser with similar specs.
But the Canvas 4 does the little things right and instead of "great specs at a low price", offers what Samsung and others have done consistently: "great experience at a low price". It's an indigenous company growing up to get out of the specifications war and offer something more.
The Gorilla Glass screen, the improved call quality, 16GB of memory, and the generally better build quality and looks of the phone do warrant a premium -- whether it's Rs. 5,000 or not is a question you have to answer. In my opinion, the sweet spot for this phone is Rs. 16,000 rather than Rs. 18,000, and history has shown that the price does drop to that in a few months, so you might want to wait it out.
Of course, this is excluding one major aspect: after-sales service. I can tell you as a Micromax user that their service centers aren't staffed well. I've seen a woman with a damaged logic board on her 3-month-old Canvas 2 being told that she'll have to wait a month for it to get repaired -- and there's no replacement offered in the interim. What's she supposed to do for a month? After-sales support is an important aspect of the phone experience and we would recommend you factor that into your buying decision.
Micromax Canvas 4 Specs:
At a price of Rs. 18,000, the Canvas 4 does appear a little over-priced when you consider its competitors have FullHD screens (like the Spice Pinnacle HD or the Wickedleaks Wammy Z+) while the Canvas HD itself retails at Rs. 5,000 lesser with similar specs.
But the Canvas 4 does the little things right and instead of "great specs at a low price", offers what Samsung and others have done consistently: "great experience at a low price". It's an indigenous company growing up to get out of the specifications war and offer something more.
The Gorilla Glass screen, the improved call quality, 16GB of memory, and the generally better build quality and looks of the phone do warrant a premium -- whether it's Rs. 5,000 or not is a question you have to answer. In my opinion, the sweet spot for this phone is Rs. 16,000 rather than Rs. 18,000, and history has shown that the price does drop to that in a few months, so you might want to wait it out.
Of course, this is excluding one major aspect: after-sales service. I can tell you as a Micromax user that their service centers aren't staffed well. I've seen a woman with a damaged logic board on her 3-month-old Canvas 2 being told that she'll have to wait a month for it to get repaired -- and there's no replacement offered in the interim. What's she supposed to do for a month? After-sales support is an important aspect of the phone experience and we would recommend you factor that into your buying decision.
Micromax Canvas 4 Specs:
OS: Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean
Network: Dual-SIM (GSM+GSM)
CPU: 1.2 GHz quad-core Mediatek MTK 6589
Screen: 5-inch 1280x720 IPS LCD with Gorilla Glass (294 ppi)
RAM: 1GB
Storage: 16GB internal, microSD up to 32GB
Camera: 13MP rear with 1080p FullHD video / 5MP front with HD video
Connectivity: 3G, Wi-Fi, EDGE, Bluetooth
Battery: 2000mAh Li-Ion
Dimensions: 144.5 x 73.8 x 8.9 mm
Weight: 158 gms
Price: Rs. 17,999
By- Om Rajput