Micromax Mad is available in Indian market for a price of around 8,500 Rupees. For that price you will get a Broadcomm chipset with Quadcore CPU and Videocore IV HW GPU. You will get two 5 megapixel camera, yes not one but two. The only difference is front one doesn’t have a LED flash. You will get a 4.5 inch IPS display with decent viewing angles. It is a dual sim phone. The question is, what does this phone has that makes it different from other phones? Well, it has an app called “Mad App”, Mad here stands for ‘Mad about ads’. I wouldn’t call you ‘MAD’ but if you have no problem watching 1 or 2 ads every time before you make a call, then this phone could turn out to be a very good investment for you. I am going to exclude that from this review because i have already done full analysis on that app you can check it out here.
Hardware & Design
It’s made of plastic with metal surrounding and the design is a little asymmetrical, as in it’s not a perfect rectangle. The phone is pretty slim and because the screen is not 5 inch or more than that, it’s very pocket friendly too, it’s also very good for one hand use. Other than that the body of the phone seems durable and doesn’t bend or creeks. One thing very unusual about the design is the placement of the power/unlock button, it’s on the left side of the phone. Unlike most phones that has that button either on the right or top right of the phone.
Display
The display like i said before is an IPS LCD with 480×854 resolution and its size is 4.5 inches. The screen is very bright and because of the size you won’t be able to see any pixels or anything. For the price i would say the screen is good. It’s quite colourful. When you play a game or watch a video on it then the real quality of the screen comes out. Especially during video playback.
Camera
It has got two 5 megapixel camera, one in the front and one in the back and the quality of both is pretty decent. In fact i would say that this is the first phone i have seen whose front camera is a little better than its primary camera. It has Autofocus and it can record video upto 720p but the video quality is not so great, you can check that in the review video below. For still images it has lots of options, like white balance, exposure and others. This phone doesn’t have that simultaneous video and still image capturing, meaning you can’t take photos while shooting a video. but that’s expected from a phone of this price. Here are some still samples.
Memory & OS
Micromax Mad A94 runs on Android 4.2 jellybean and Micromax has not done any customization on top of it. Except for some apps. Like the ‘MAd and M! Live” apps, which is a good thing because this phone does not have that much RAM anyway to run the customization properly. It is mostly bare bones jellybean or what most people call it “stock” Android. Memory of this phone both RAM and ROM are far from sufficient. RAM is only 512MB out of which only around 80MB will stay free after opening one or two apps and when the phone will consume all of the free memory then it most likely choke all the apps till they crash. So, i must advise to not open to many apps at the same time. One or two is fine.
Internal memory is 4GB out of which only approx 1GB or less than 1GB will be available for you to utilize. Although you can use memory card up to 32GB and exapand the memory but you can only use it for music, photos, videos and other stuff. You can not directly install big games on memory card. You does have the option of Move to SD though. You can move apps, games easily from internal memory to external memory.
Performance
It has Broadcomm chipset don’t confuse it with Galaxy Grand’s chipset as that one is a dual core but the one inside this phone has Quad core cortex A7 CPU and Videocore IV HW GPU and that combination is somewhat equivalent to Quad core Cortex A7 and Adreno 305. The performance of this phone could have been very similar to Sony Xperia M if it has 1GB RAM but unfortunately it doesn’t. So as a result, the performance of this phone falls below average especially in gaming department. It sometimes gets slow when there are lots of apps are open at the same time. All because of the low RAM. So the performance is quite decent if you use it wisely. Otherwise you will end up with a lot of hanging problems.
Connectivity & Call Quality
It has 3G, it has dual sims, it has wifi what else do you want from a budget phone in terms of connectivity? Call quality is loud and clear. Call quality also depends on the operator sometimes, you can not blame the phone if you experience echo on it. The phone has a speaker it is doing its job, give it a break man.
Music & Videos
The music quality of this phone especially in ears through headphones or earphones is very good of this phone. It is exactly as i like. Soothing, melodious, punchy sometimes but not heavy on ears unlike most of the Micromax phones that shouts in ear. If you increase the volume to the top they are like they will tear your ear drums anytime. But this phone even if you turn the volume to the fullest on this phone it will still not shout in your ears. That depends on earphones too though, if you have earphones that are a little high on treble then obviously it will sound noisy. It has an equalizer, the music player is default android player by the way. In terms of video playback it can play 1080p videos by default without any problems. Do i need to say more? Speaker is decent, you can hear it in the video below.
Battery
Battery of a smartphone is like a pack of skittles or gems no matter how slowly how little little you eat them, you will still end up emptying the packet. Same happens to a smartphone battery. It all depends on you, if you want you can eat it slowly or quickly not literally of course. I meant as in if you are constantly going to play games on it with high brightness and wifi/3g on then obviously the battery won’t even last 5 hours. But if you use it wisely lie a little this(calling,messaging), little that(gaming,web browsing), little everything. You can easily get one day out of it. If you only use it for calling then you can even get more than one day on it. The battery is of 1800 mAh theoretically. Practically it can be as little as 800 mAh or as big as 18000 mAh it all depends on your use.
Choice
In the end it all comes to this, choice. It’s all about your choice. I can only help you by showing what a phone can and can not do and make it a little simple for you. Ultimately choice is going to be of yours. Now, for this phone. If you want a phone anything for other than heavy gaming and you are a little tight on budget then i would totally suggest you this phone. Music and camera capabilities of this phone are pretty good looking at the price of this phone. It’s better than those quad core cortex A5 phones that are available in this price range. And on top of everything it can even pay you back in a way. You can read more on that on my ‘MAd‘ app analysis.