Micromax Canvas A1 aka Android One is the best 6,000 Rupees smartphone in India and maybe the best $100 smartphone in the world too. It’s not that it’s perfect but the fact that what this phone can do for the price you are paying is simply amazing. Although some people might not like it ‘çause it’s got 4.5 inches screen whereas 5 inches has become a somewhat standard or people’s choice now a days.
Build Quality
As you can expect from a 6,000 Rupees phone the build quality is not that great, the materials used to make the phone feels very cheap. It’s mainly made of plastic and has got rubberised back panel. In the front there’s no protective glass its just the standard glass that you get on most of the phones. It’s got a very tiny notification LED right beside the ear-piece that glows in green colour every time there’s a notification of message or call.
Display
Canvas A1 has got a 4.5 inches IPS LCD display of FWVGA resolution. Got good viewing angles and colour saturation but it looks kind of washed out while displaying bright colours. At less than medium brightness you might have problem reading the screen in bright sunlight. You could increase the brightness to full but that would take a toll on its already bad battery life. So all in all A1’s screen is not that great. It’s just decent.
Camera
The quality of Canvas A1 5MP auto focus camera is pretty good especially outside in day light. It takes photos with lots of details and captures good colours too. But inside that performance degrades by a little, still it takes decent enough photos, but the colour quality and image quality decreases by a margin. And during low light, night time, bad light conditions its quality becomes very bad it doesn’t pick up that much light and makes the photo looks messy.
Its flash like most of the phones doesn’t get concentrated at one point rather it spreads all over the place more of a software feature, making the low light photo looks as if it were taken in day light but doing that takes away the natural colour of the image. Does a decent job though. It can take 1080p videos in MP4 format but the quality is not that good. You can also take photos and videos together by tapping on the screen while shooting the video but the photos will come out horrible especially if the object is in motion as you can see in the gallery below. It also has 2MP fixed focus front camera which takes decent enough selfies in good lighting conditions. Like all the front cameras in Micromax phones it tries its best to make you look as pale as possible.
Multimedia
Micromax Canvas A1’s music quality especially in headphones is very good given that you use a good pair of headphones/earphones though. I was kind of surprised the first time i heard it. For 6,000 Rupees this is like the best music quality you can get in headphones. It’s very clean and warm. The kind of soothing sound that i like. All i can say is that it sound like music and not loud noise. The back speaker is decent not that loud but the quality is good you can hear the music instruments individually. It can 1080p videos without any problems in its default video player.
Storage/RAM/OS
Lets talk about the OS first. Canvas A1 runs on stock Android 4.4.4 KitKat. All thanks to that it runs buttery smooth even on not so much powerful hardware. It hardly ever stutter or lags. The whole OS remains smooth. Since Canvas A1 comes under Android One program it will guaranteed receive the Android L and regular updates from Google for 2 years. What more could you ask for in 6,000 Rupees?
It comes with 4GB of internal storage out of which you’ll get around 2GB free to use and 1GB of RAM out of which you’ll get around 400MB free to use. And it also supports move to SD feature so that you could put that 8GB free memory card it comes with to good use.
Performance
Canvas A1 comes with Mediatek MTK6582 chipset which has quad-core Cortex A7 CPU clocked at 1.3GHz and Mali 400MP GPU, on the paper it doesn’t seem much but couple this with proper software optimization and this 6,000 Rupees phone could play GTA San Andreas at max settings without any lags although Canvas A1’s FWVGA resolution screen does help in achieving that feet but still for that price its remarkable. It has got a score of 18000 in Antutu triple of its price. That says everything about this phone’s performance you seriously can not expect more at this price.
Connectivity
Canvas A1 is a dual sim device it takes two micro sims. It’s circular ear piece in the front does a very good job and also its network and WiFi coverage is also good. Apart from that it also has cast screen and Bluetooth 4.0.
Battery
This is the only downside of this Android One smartphone. Its battery is literally very small not in size but in capacity. It’s of only 1700 mAh. If it had a 2000 or 2300 mAh battery this phone could’ve been almost perfect for 6,000 Rupees. It only last around like 6 hours exactly what company is suggesting. And if you use it at more than half brightness with WiFi on 3G on it won’t even last that much. It’s battery performance is really not that good. You might be able to take out 7 or 8 hours out of it if you use it only for talking and messaging and occasional web browsing.
Choice/Verdict
Screw the choice just buy it if you have 6,000 Rupees and want an android smartphone with great performance, that’s my advice.