Micromax is smartly expanding its foray in online and offline smartphone market. At one place, the Indian smartphone manufacturer has YU brand that follows the flash sale model and is doing very well in budget smartphone category. And on the other hand, the company has its traditional offline retail chain model, which comprises various budget and mid range smartphones.
Having said that, today we are reviewing Canvas Doodle 4, which is the budget phablet from the manufacturer with a large display and MediaTek’s quad-core Soc. Let’s check out how the smartphone competes with other in sub 10k category.
Display
Fourth in the series, canvas Doodle Q391features the signature large 6-inch display that serves well for multimedia as well as productivity tasks. You can watch your favourite movies, video songs and play 3D games. Moreover, the large screen is perfect for using social networking applications and creating/editing documents on the go.
However, the qHD resolution (540x960) with such a large display results in a meagre pixel count of 184ppi. This is the reason the pictures, texts, icons, etc. does not look crisp and smartphone fails to compete with the rivals. The problem worsens when you take the smartphone outside in sunlight. The display is very reflective and has poor viewing angles, which makes it difficult to see the content. Smartphones such as Yureka (Micromax’s YU brand), Redmi 2, Lenovo A7000 costs less and have much better display. If you just care for a large display then it might work for you otherwise smartphones we mentioned above are better options.
Design
The smartphone is designed neatly and looks quite appealing. The front has the large 6 inch display, a 2.1 MP camera, speaker grill and the light sensor at top and three touch capacitive buttons at the bottom of the display. The side bezels are very minimal, which makes display look larger than 6 inch when the smartphone is locked.
Micromax canvas Doodle has a silver metallic frame which adds a premium touch to the overall look of the smartphone. The white color removable rear panel has a matte finish and feels very good in hands. The Micromax signature logo sits at the centre, just below the LED flash and 8 MP round camera module. The bottom of the rear panel houses the mono speaker grill.
Overall, we liked the design of the phablet. Micromax has used high quality material and Canvas Doodle 4 looks quite premium considering the price point it comes at.
Performance
Canvas Doodle 4 is powered by a 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek (MTK6582M) processor coupled with 1GB of RAM to carry out multitasking. There were no issues encountered in basic functionality such as opening and closing of applications, navigating from one screen to another and running basic apps such as dialler, camera, app drawer, etc. However, the moderate chipset struggles if you quickly shift from one app to another and launch some heavy applications. It is just good for basic tasks. Smartphones such as Lenovo A7000, Redmi 2 and Yureka offer better computing performance than the Doodle 4.
Moreover, the 1 GB RAM just suffices for 6 to 7 applications at a time and the smartphone starts to lag if you try to work with more than 10 applications in the background. The other smartphones we mentioned above have double the RAM which makes them a better option if you perform heavy multitasking. Canvas Doodle 4 comes with 8GB of inbuilt storage that can be further expanded up-to 32 GB via microSD card.
Camera
Now talking about the camera performance, the smartphone comes loaded with an 8 MP rear camera with an LED flash and a 2 MP front facing camera for taking selfies and video calling. We found out that the camera performance is definitely an improvement over its predecessor Doodle 3, but fails to impress when compared with Yuphoria, Lenovo A7000 and Redmi 2.
The camera interface is quite stock android. It has Panorama, White balance option, Color effects, Exposure control, HDR, Beauty mode and Smile capture. We are not impressed by the camera performance. It takes time to focus the subject and the resulting images lacks details and liveliness. The colors looks washed out and low-light pictures have lots of noise. We do not recommend this smartphone if you want to buy a good camera smartphone under 10k.
Battery
The 3000 mAh battery unit has to support the large 6 inch display and a quad-core CPU and it struggles to keep the phablet alive. Canvas Doodle 4 lasted for 7 hours 50 minutes in everyday moderate usage, which is not the best in this range. In our standard video playback test (100% brightness at full volume with Wi-Fi on), the smartphone survived for 4 hours 25 minutes.