Micromax Canvas HD Plus Review

Micromax Canvas HD Plus A190 is a decent smartphone. It’s over all price to performance ratio is pretty good. There are some downsides too in this phone. But you really can not expect everything at 12,000 Rupees. This 10,000 – 15,000 Rupees price bracket is so active in India right now. People are expecting more and more from less. Less is the money here. Canvas HD Plus somehow delivers on that. It is the cheapest smartphone with Hexa core processor in India right now. In this review i am going to tell you about everything you need to know before you decide whether to buy or not to buy this phone.

Hardware & Design

Micromax Canvas HD Plus A190’s body is made of plastic which is a total fingerprint magnet. It also catches dust and smudges pretty fast. It is pretty slim. The best part about this phone’s hardware is despite of packing a decently powerful chipset. It still weighs next to nothing. It’s really light weight. And yes i am talking with the battery inside.

It also has Gorilla Glass in front which makes the front almost scratch resistant. It also protects the actual LCD to shatter in case it falls from your hand. It does have a notification LED. Out of three capacitive touch buttons, the middle one which has an icon of home acts as Notification LED. It glows either red or green in colour.

Display

Canvas HD Plus comes with a 5 inch IPS LCD display of HD resolution. And according to Micromax’s website it doesn’t have 16 million colours instead it comes with 256k colours. But it is still a pretty good display and because of being an IPS LCD its viewing angles are good too. Videos look good on it. Although its not that crisp as 16 million colours one. But HD resolution makes up for it a little bit. And the colour saturation is on the warm side. It’s not hard on your eyes. All in all i would call it a decent display.

Camera

For some reason Micromax’s Canvas HD Plus A190’s 8MP camera makes everything a little more white. Even where is not enough light around. That’s why the image looks unreal something. But the image quality of the camera is pretty good. I am talking about details here. It captures a lot of details. Colours could be a little off sometimes. It also got touch to focus, auto focus, object tracking. Everything to make the image look clear.

And yes you can take photos and videos at the same time with Canvas HD Plus. It also comes with a 2MP front camera the quality of which is not that great especially in low light. It can shoot video up-to 1080p resolution in 3GP format and it comes with dedicated noise cancellation mic. Below are some still samples and video sample is in the review video below.

Multimedia

Music quality of this phone is not good. It’s not even decent. And no matter how good of a headphones/earphones you’d use it’s still going to stay that way. The problem is the music sounds so shallow of this phone. Its like it doesn’t have any depth. The bass almost doesn’t exist. If you turn the bass boost up-to full it’s just going to tear the sound and full volume it sounds even worse. The headphones that comes with it in its box doesn’t help either. They are not very good.

Same goes for the external speaker of this phone, it’s pretty weak sometimes it sounds decent with some songs but most of the time it’s weak and even ringtone sound is too low. Video playback on the other hand is very good. It plays full HD videos in its default video player without any problems. And the videos look good on it too. And it also got a pop up video function, you can pop the window in which the video is playing and can place it anywhere on the screen, you can also pause or close it from there too. You can see how in screen shots below.

Storage/RAM/OS

Micromax Canvas HD Plus comes with 8GB of internal storage on paper. Out of which you will get around 1GB for apps and 4GB for multimedia. It does supports move to sd, preferred to install location, default write location all of those storage related features are there. You’ll never have memory related problems with this phone. It can take micro sd card up-to 32GB. RAM of this phone is 1GB out of which around 400MB remains free for the user most of the time. It comes with Android version 4.4.2 KitKat out of the box with a very little customization from Micromax. Oh, and it does support USB OTG and it works flawlessly. You can see the demo in review video below.

Performance

This is the department in which i have no complaints with this phone. It can any application any graphic intensive game without any issues. All thanks to the Mediatek MTK 6591 chipset, which contains 6 Cortex A7 processors clocked at 1.5 GHz, and Mali 450MP4 GPU. I can easily say this is the most powerful phone right now you can get for around 11,000-12,000 Rupees. Although, since this processor is fairly new and almost nothing is optimized for it specifically. You might notice some slow downs or occasional stuttering but it’s nothing major.

Call Quality/Connectivity

Call quality of this phone is good, it loud and clear enough. Connectivity wise it’s pretty jam packed too. It supports dual sim, one full size mini sim and one micro sim. The WiFi of this phone is very good. It’s pretty fast and hardly ever drops the signal. It also has Bluetooth 4.0 amd cast screen functionality.

Battery

Canvas HD Plus comes with a 2000 mAh Li-Polymer battery. And it’s very good. Despite of being just 2000 mAh, you can use it for whole day on normal use and it would still have some juice left in the evening. Although, if you constantly play games like GTA San Andreas on it with WiFi it will last only 5 hours. To the max 6. But with normal use it can last up-to one day without any problems.

To give you an idea during my Gaming performance video i also did a battery test on it. And after around 25 minutes of gaming the battery was down from 96% to 88%. Pretty good huh. And the best part it never gets as much hot as Canvas Gold or Knight no matter how much load you put on the battery or the processor.

Verdict/Choice

First let me tell you what i liked and what i didn’t like about this phone. There’s only one thing i didn’t like of this phone and that is its music quality. I have heard much better around same price range. It seriously sound like some cheap Chinese mp3 player. Apart from that its screen, processor, build quality, battery everything is very decent if not very good.

So i can definitely recommend this phone to anyone whom is looking for more than decent performance from a phone under a tight budget. But for someone whose top most priority in a smartphone is its music quality, i would suggest you to stay away from this phone. Like i always say final choice will always be yours. If you still can’t decide and/or confused about something. Just ask me anything you want to know about the phone in the comments below.