Micromax Canvas Gold A300 Review

With Micromax Canvas Knight A350 the main problem was proper software optimization. But Micromax Canvas Gold A300 comes with the latest version of Android i.e, Android 4.4.2 and the same processor 2GHz octa core Cortex A7 that Canvas Knight came with. Then what is the problem? Well, the problem is. Kitkat is actually not optimized to run on an octa core processor efficiently. Kitkat is actually optimized for low end smartphones, especially for quad core smartphones. It’s not like this phone doesn’t perform well or anything. But oh Well, just read the review you will know what i am talking about.

Hardware & Design

Canvas Gold A300 is only 6.9mm thick and if you consider the camera bump too at the back. It’s thickness would be roughly 7mm. Not much of a difference. The phone is pretty well built it doesn’t bend, it feels pretty solid in hand. The back and the sides are made of metal(aluminium). The front is made of glass, Gorilla Glass to be exact as it turned out, it doesn’t have Gorilla Glass. Since the phone is mostly metal at the back, it gets warm pretty quick. Unlike Canvas Knight, Canvas Gold has rounded a little oval like design.

It doesn’t come with a dedicated camera shutter key. Out of the two sim slots i want to warn you about one of them. The first one in which you put micro sim, don’t even by mistake put the sim inside upside down. Or you’ll have a hard time trying to take it out. The three touch capacitive touch buttons works well they are very responsive.

Display

Canvas Gold comes with a 5.5 inches LCD display of Full HD resolution and it is not an IPS panel it is a new type of LCD called LTPS(Low Temperature PolySilicon). I am not going to go in detail here but i can tell you what it is in a nutshell. Well basically in LTPS type LCD the pixels are much closer to each other than a normal LCD. That increases the overall DPI or Pixel Density of the screen and it makes the screen more accurate. The colour looks more warm and not over saturated like some AMOLED displays. The viewing angles are pretty great too. Just like an IPS display but slightly more better. Sunlight readability is good too.

Camera

It comes with a 16MP camera sensor made by sony and it doesn’t disappoint. The camera clarity is actually pretty good both in videos and photos. It captures a lot of details and tries to keep the colour natural. Which is a good thing. It comes with various other features too as you can see in the video below. It can shoot 1080p videos and its got a noise cancellation mic at the back near the camera. You can see the image samples below and for video sample you have to watch the review video.

It also has touch to focus and auto focus and also voice capture. You can take photos just by saying ‘capture’. You can also take photos and videos simultaneously. In the front it has 5MP camera there’s also a front camera sample below.

Multimedia

The music quality of this phone is not that good. The speaker is pretty loud but the actually music quality which you can only tell only if you listen through headphones/earphones is not that good. There’s always a little distortion. And sometimes you can even hear the echo of the song itself pretty loud if you tweak with the equalizer a lot or use wrong earphones.

To give you an example the earphones that works with iPhone won’t work with this phone. It’s not like won’t work at all they will work but only partially. That is because of the difference in 3.5mm connectors. The earphones comes with Canvas Gold are decent you can use them if yours don’t work. They are a little heavy on bass though.

Storage/RAM

Canvas Gold comes with 32GB inbuilt storage. Out of which 25GB is available for the user. It doesn’t have micro sd card slot. So, you can not expand it further. But you does have one benefit here though. Inbuilt storage is way faster than a class 4 micro sd card. So if you copy paste a lot from your phone to computer or vice-versa, it will save a lot of your time. RAM is 2GB out of which 1GB is available for the user most of the time.

Since it only has one pool of memory you won’t have much trouble installing big games on this phone. No need to move to sd or something. It does say around 1.4GB for apps but that means for the apk alone not the whole app data. That will get stored on the 25GB of total storage so, storage is not an issue at least not for me in Canvas Gold.

Performance/Heating

This is the criteria which directly related to the heating issue of this phone. In simple words the harder it tries to perform the more hot it gets. Canvas Gold runs on the same chipset as Canvas Knight, Mediatek MTK 6592T which has a combination of Octa core Cortex A7 clocked or rather over clocked at 2GHz and Mali 450MP4 GPU(A GPU made by the ARM itself). This chipset is very powerful.

That is both good and bad. Good in terms of performance as it can run any game or app that requires a powerful processor. And bad in terms of heat it generates and draining the battery. It drains the battery pretty fast if all the processor are running at the same time. Which is indeed the case while playing the games.

Because demanding games are going to use every resource they can to run well. They are designed that way. The worst part is you can’t do anything about this. Maybe a software update could do something about it or maybe under clock it back to 1.7GHz just maybe. Until then you just have to live with the heat. It also gets a little warm while it’s charging.

Connectivity/Call quality

It is a dual sim device, one is micro sim and the other is mini sim. Only one can use 3G at a time. You can’t use 3G on both sims at the same time. The WiFi is decent sometimes it loses a bar or two of network even when in the same room as the WiFi router. So that’s something. Call quality is good. Pretty loud and clear.

Apart from that it also has Bluetooth 4.0, USB otg and cast screen functionality, with which you can connect your phone to your LCD tv if you have an Android dongle connected to it. And also one more thing that i noticed in this phone and other android smartphones that i reviewed lately. None of them comes with a 2G only option anymore.

Which is pretty bad because if you keep the phone at ‘2G/3G auto’ always. It will always try to search for the 3G networks which will deplete you battery even more. Even if your data connection is off. Looking at the condition of 3G networks in India it might just keep searching on and on and still would find only 1 bar. Companies should give the 2G only option back.

Battery

Well, to give you a small idea during my canvas gold gaming video i played graphic intensive games for more or less 1 hour. The battery according to CPU-Z was something around 50% and after my play-through the battery was around 20% so, that’s a straight 30% drop in around one hour. But that’s only while gaming. I noticed that if you use it normally and don’t play games continuously on it and with WiFi off it might last you more than 7 hours.

Company’s suggested talk-time is 8 hours by the way. Which you are only going to get if you use it occasionally.
For example just take it out of your pocket to look at the notifications make a important call and put it back in.

Choice

This is where the fun part starts. The choice. Which you have to make. This phone is competing directly with its younger brother Canvas Knight(I like to call it ‘Black Beast’ sometimes because of its performance and pitch black colour). Knight has 5 inch screen while this has 5.5 inch screen. So that’s something up-to personal preference. I ain’t gonna bother trying to pick best between two screen sizes.

However, if you decide not to go with Canvas Knight as Canvas Gold’s alternative and wants to go with say something like Galaxy Grand 2 or Sony Xperia M2, T2 ultra and other similar phones from respectable brands then i can help you. If you like raw performance and a little does not bother you then go with Canvas Gold, period. But if you want better after sales service better software optimization then you can with either of those phones.

Remember the end choice will always be yours. So choose what you want and if you have confusion regarding your selection just type your question in the comments below and i will try my best to help.