Micromax Canvas Nitro: Small budget, Decent performance

Micromax has been reworking strategies for quite some time, and after their launch of the Canvas Gold , the company has kept it low key. Meanwhile, Motorola with their Moto G and Moto E along with Xiaomi with their Mi3 and Redmi 1s have really made a dent in the market.

Specs
Display: 5 inch IPS display1280x720 resolution(294ppi)
Battery: 2500mAh
Camera: 13MP rear with LED flash, 5MP front
SoC: Mediatek MT6592
CPU: 1.7GHz Quad-core
RAM: 2GB

Display & Design

If you've ever felt that the majority of phones are just variations of each other, the Micromax Canvas Nitro won't really change that impression. At first glance the Nitro looks like just another Micromax device with an undistinctive glass front with three capacitive buttons at the bottom of the screen. The story changes when you come to the back of the device as Micromax has used a faux leather back with fake stitchings instead of the matte or smooth plastic back it generally uses on its phones.

Micromax Canvas Nitro looks better than the company's previous budget offerings, with its all black, plastic front panel and rounded corners. 
                                      The right edge of the phone has a power key while the left edge features the volume rocker. The keys are made of white coloured plastic and offer good tactile feedback. The 3.5mm headset jack sits at the top while the micro-USB port is placed at the bottom. 

                                     The phone has a 5-inch HD display (720x1280p) and is good to look at. Graphics and text appear sharp and viewing angles were pretty good. Sunlight legibility was also satisfactory. Touch sensitivity was also very good with the phone being able to register the slightest of touch strokes.

Hardware & Performance

Micromax has fitted the Canvas Nitro with the octa-core Mediatek MT6592 processor which is clocked at 1.7GHz and has an integrated Mali-450 GPU. The Canvas Nitro also features 2GB of RAM. Out of the 8GB of internal storage space, only 5.68GB is available for users but you can expand this by up to 32GB using a microSD card.  The phone accepts two Micro-SIM cards and they connect to the 850/ 900/ 1800/ 1900/ 2100 network bands. It can also connect to Wi-Fi networks and other Bluetooth-enabled devices. A 2500mAh battery provides the juice for the device. The 5-inch 720p display is great for the most part with vibrant colours and good viewing angles, but things go downhill when viewed under direct sunlight. The screen is very reflective and we had a difficult time trying to use this phone because of this. 

                         The Micromax Canvas Nitro handles day to day usage without any problem, and for once this phone does not heat up at all, mostly pertaining to the fact that the device is made entirely out of plastic. At any pint of time the total amount of free RAM is approximately 600+ MB, leaving you to wonder where the phone is utilising in excess of 1.3 GB of RAM. The included clean up app does open up about 120-140 MB of RAM, but that is still less considering that the device is running on Kitkat.  In synthetic benchmarks, the phone scored 29,882 in Antutu, 13,266 in Quadrant, 1938 in Geekbench 3(Multi-core) and 60.6 in Nenamark 2 benchmark tests. Some of these benchmark scores are slightly less than the Xiaomi Mi 3's but are considerably higher than the new Moto G's scores. 

Software
The Canvas Nitro runs Android 4.4 KitKat, the latest iteration of the OS and Micromax has included a number of new software features including 'Quick Look' - an HTC BlinkFeed-like home screen feed that displays news, weather and social updates, a camera widget for quick access to different camera modes and enhanced lock screen notifications. 

The smartphone also offers 'Smart Alerts' that offer a colour coded band for different notifications (including for SMS, calls, Facebook, Gmail, Whatsapp and Hangouts) on the lock screen. We found the feature to be useful. The software also supports on screen finger gestures that can be enabled by long pressing on the home screen and tapping on the Gestures button. you can program different gestures to initiate different actions. For instance, a two finger flick can open the messaging app. The gestures feature worked as promised. 

Camera
Micromax Canvas Nitro sports a 13MP rear camera with LED flash and a 5MP front-facing camera. The big sensor size doesn't really translate into great camera performance. The phone takes decent images in day light but the default white balance was a bit off resulting in some pictures appearing as if a sepia filter has been applied. Colour reproduction was accurate though the level of detail was certainly not very high. 

Pictures taken in low light and dark conditions did not turn out well. These pictures were noisy and lacked detail.

PHONE, NETWORKS AND BATTERY

Signal quality is excellent indoors as well as outdoors, audio is good on a call whether incoming or out going. As far as networks are concerned the plastic body definitely improves any WiFi connectivity issues faced by the previous generation of Canvas phones.

Battery life if good for one day’s use with the included 2500 mAh battery, which is removable and replaceable by the user. You will get an average talk time of 5-6 hours with both SIM cards placed in the phone.

If you are a light user you can easily run into the second day, however a charge a day would be recommended to keep you in a healthy battery position.

The Micromax Canvas Nitro is a step in the right direction for Indian manufacturers, especially considering they are taking huge flack from companies like Xiaomi and Motorola who are basically now playing in their space.

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