Micromax Canvas 4: Great Upgrade to the Canvas HD

We take a look at the latest flagship device from Micromax, how is this differrent from its predecessor Canvas HD A116, and try to decipher whether the biggest domestic smartphone brand can convince mid-range smartphone buyers with its latest launch.

Look & Feel

The phone has an aluminium band around the high-grade plastic body with a flat glass front which has capacitive buttons that appear only when you switch it on.The device is 8.9 mm thick and weighs around 158 grams which is an average weight for a smartphone. The device is quite good looking , well-built and fits perfectly in one hand.

Performance

The Micromax phone has got some good upgrades from Canvas HD. The software upgrade, camera, and voila are some noticable features. But the display technology remains the same as it has the 720p IPS LCD capacitive display. The 5-inch HD IPS display is bright and has surprisingly good viewing angles. Though the outdoor visibility on low brightness is not so great.The great thing about the display is Gorilla Glass which makes it scratch resistant so you can afford to be a little more free with how you use your handset. The major flaw that we noticed in this handset at our fist look is the "Blow to Unlock" feature, where you can blow on the lock from a distance. This feature is very inconsistent as if you blow too lightly, it won't work and if you hold the phone under a fan it will unlock.And the alternative way is ‘shake to unlock',which is very annoying. Moreover this is also available on the Play Store for other devices.

The good part is that you can choose to disable this feature.The phone is powered by a 1.2 GHz quad-core MediaTek 6589 processor with PowerVR SGX544 MP2 GPU similar to the A116 Canvas HD. The processor did get through most tasks without any lag at all.

Multi-tasking with different apps is smooth, and the gameplay experience was quite good though after 20-30 min you will feel the heat on both side of this device. The built-in software like antivirus and the custom music player are nice additions, but again the gesture-based feature is average. 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. The call quality and reception of the phone has improved a lot from its predecessors. Another plus about this device is its memory capacity that got a major upgrade on the new canvas 4 which was a major problem for the previous canvas HD users. Now you have 16GB storage that can be expanded upto 32 Gb.