The Canvas Hue stays true to its name with a stunning display.
With stunning design and AMOLED high-definition display, Micromax's Canvas Hue aims to come out victorious in the budget smartphone segment. Launched in January 2015, Canvas Hue is priced at Rs 10,593.
On the first glance, the phone resembles an iPhone 4 with the same white and gold colours.
It has brushed metal side panels and like the iPhone, a glass back cover. The only difference between the Canvas Hue and the iPhone 4 in terms of appearance is the absence of the trademark iPhone button.
Although the phone looks good, it doesn't boast an iPhone's quality. But for a phone under Rs 15,000, the quality is more than acceptable. The Canvas Hue has been compared to theMotorola Moto G but the latter definitely has a better build.
The phone appears thicker but at 380g, it's quite light. As with glass-backed phones, one needs to be careful during one-handed use. The phone comes with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 that makes the front tougher but like the Nexus 4 and iPhones, the back is susceptible to damage.
The back cover, flush with the rest of the phone, has to be pried open for adding SIM cards.
The Canvas Hue stays true to its name by having a stunning display. With a five-inch Super AMOLED display, the colour and contrast reproduction stand out.
Though they do not look life-like, they are better than those in most phones in this range. Usually, sunlight makes viewing AMOLED displays a tad difficult but the Canvas Hue seems to have rid itself of this issue.
The phone comes with an eight-megapixel (MP) primary and a 2MP secondary camera. The primary camera takes images of good quality, comparable to those taken with the Asus Zenfone or the Xiaomi RedMi Note 4G. Like all other smartphones, it comes with auto-focus and flash.
The secondary camera can be used to take selfies. The main camera shoots videos in 720 pixels (standard high-definition) but the audio captured is incoherent.
The Canvas Hue runs on Android 4.4 KitKat but Micromax has announced it would soon upgrade to Lollipop over-the-air.
The phone doesn't have a dedicated app drawer and all apps are present on the homescreen. Scrolling through the apps is quite smooth but the capacitive touch buttons could have been more responsive.
Micromax has packaged the Canvas Hue with a number of preloaded apps such as TrueCaller, Skype, Dr Safety and Grow Away. It comes with certain M! apps that are mostly non-essential but they can't be uninstalled, which ruins the experience.
The phone runs on a quad-core processor clocked at 1.3GHz and has 1GB of RAM. This pales in comparison with the Asus Zenfone or the Moto G, both of which have more powerful processors. It comes with internal memory of 8GB and an expandable memory of 32GB.
The show-stealer is the battery with the Super Saver mode. It comes with a big 3,000mAh battery that lasts up to 20 hours on a single charge.
The phone has a feature called the Super Power Saver mode, which can provide a month of battery backup, the company claims.
Upon activating this feature, the screen becomes greyscale and messaging services such as WhatsApp get disabled for better productivity. The powerful battery backup gives it an edge over its competitors.
However, the battery backup is not that strong a criterion to make it the best in its category. Micromax still has a long way to go when it comes to launching a worthy competitor to the Moto G or the Zenfone.
SPECIFICATIONS
- Price: Rs 10,593
- Display: 5-inch AMOLED display, 1,280x720 pixels
- Processor: 1.3GHz quad- ore processor
- RAM: 1GB
- Battery : 3,000mAh
- Camera(rear/front): 8MP/2MP
- Weight: 380g
Photographs, courtesy: Micromax
