Motorola created a great buzz in the budget smartphone segment by launching Moto E last year. First time smartphone users readily accepted this product of Motorola. Low price and great specifications, both these features made this mobile phone the market leader. As soon as this product was launched, brands like Asus, Lenovo, and Xiaomi also focused on this price segment. Although Micromax products were already available in this price range, there was not much enthusiasm in the market about their performance.
Recently Micromax has launched Canvas Spark smartphone. The price of this phone is less than Rs 5,000 and it runs on the latest version of Android Lollipop. It also has a quad core processor. Should you buy this phone? We tell you.
Look and design
Looking at the product, it seems that Micromax has tried hard to give it a premium look. We got a white/gold unit for review but a grey/silver option is also available in the market. The thickness of the phone is 8.5 mm and its edges are curved. The weight of this 135 gram phone is uniform in all parts, due to which it feels good when held in the hand. The gold trim on the edges of the phone is actually made of plastic. However, Micromax has given it a metallic coating to make it look real. A similar color scheme was also seen in Micromax Canvas Gold A300.
The screen of the smartphone is 4.7 inches. The upper part houses the ear piece, front camera and light sensor. The touch sensitive buttons for navigation are placed at the bottom. The outlines of these buttons are very thin and the lights do not glow in them, which makes them difficult to use.
The power and volume buttons are located on the right edge of the phone. The performance of these buttons is average. The speaker is placed at the bottom of the back of the phone. As far as the rear camera is concerned, it is slightly protruding out of the phone, which makes it prone to scratches. There may also be a problem in balancing it on a flat surface. The brand’s metallic logo is engraved below the camera. The rear cover can come off, but you can only use the SIM card slot and the micro SD card slot. The battery does not come off.
Specifications and software
Micromax has relied on the tried and tested MediaTek MT6582 SoC for the Canvas Spark. This SoC uses four 1.3GHz processor cores and has integrated Mali 400 graphics. The phone has 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage which can be expanded up to 32GB via a microSD card.
The primary camera of Canvas Spark is 8 megapixels and it can also shoot videos in 720 pixels. The phone has a 2 megapixel front camera. This phone offers dual SIM support and at least one SIM card can work on 3G network. As far as other connectivity is concerned, it also has the option of Wi-Fi a/b/g/n and Bluetooth v4.0. This device has a 2000mAh battery, which gives 7 hours of talk time and its standby time is 335 hours.
The 4.7-inch IPS screen has a resolution of 540×960, which is also found on the Motorola Moto E (Gen 2). The Canvas Spark’s screen is average and performs below average in sunlight. The good news is that the display is not overly saturated, which makes the warm colors pleasing to the eyes. And the screen is protected by Corning’s Gorilla Glass 3, which is good.
Micromax has not tampered much with the Android Lollipop version except changing the background of the app drawer from white to transparent dark grey. The company has also provided a lot of third-party apps for its customers, most of which are useless and cannot be removed.
Performance and camera
There are many shortcomings in the performance of Canvas Spark. On many occasions, after touching the app icon, we had to wait for 15 seconds for it to become active. During standby mode, the screen was not responsive many times. Due to these shortcomings, the phone did not feel smooth. The shortcomings of the phone were clearly visible while playing high-end games. However, there was no lack in performance during casual games.
The phone scored 19,499 and 5,494 points in AnTuTu and Quadrant benchmark tests, which are comparable to other smartphones with similar hardware. In the GFXbench graphics test, the Canvas Spark scored 9.3fps and 3,231 in the 3DMark Ice Storm test.
There were many problems in playing 1080p video files, sometimes frames were dropping. The speaker sound is good but it starts breaking at high volume. The sound in the headset provided by the company is fine but a lot of improvement can be seen in the sound in good earphones. The sound was good during phone calls and we did not face the problem of phone call drops.
The battery of the Canvas Spark lasted for 7 hours and 16 minutes during the video loop test, most phones in this range also give similar performance. However, the battery life of the phone dropped drastically during processor intensive tasks.
The camera was quite disappointing. The photos taken with the rear camera had flaws like underexposure and oversaturation. While shooting videos at 720 pixels, the camera app hung several times. However, the recorded video footage did not have as many flaws. However, the problem of underexposure was also seen in the video footage. There were a lot of grains in the shots taken in low light, the performance of the front camera was also not very good.
Our recommendation
We appreciate what Micromax has tried to achieve with the Canvas Spark, but the performance is clearly missing. In terms of design and price, this smartphone is a winner. The price of Canvas Spark is Rs 4,999, which is Rs 1,000 less than other budget range smartphones. If budget is an important issue then this phone is for you. But, we would suggest you to spend a little more money and buy Motorola Moto E (Gen 2) or Xiaomi Redmi 2, your smartphone experience will be better.
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