Micromax A116 Canvas HD Review

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Camera
The 8MP shooter seems to have been lifted from the A110, albeit with a slightly different interface. There’s the usual selection of exposure, colour effect, scene modes and white balance. For stills, the camera is also capable of burst mode, up to 99 shots. Unlike the One X, holding down the shutter button doesn’t kick-start burst mode immediately. There’s a little lag and that’s mainly due to the focus speed being a little slow. Even for macro shots, the camera takes more than a couple of seconds to focus before it’s ready to capture. The image quality is pretty good for indoor and outdoor shots. The sensor is able to pick up decent amount of detail and accurate colours. Once you zoom in to 100 percent, the details get a bit hazy, but that’s to be expected from a camera at this price point.

Burst mode is an added bonus

Captures good detail but focus speed is slow

The funny thing is, Micromax claims that the A116 is limited to 720 video when it easily manages to record in 1080p if the video quality is set to "Fine". The video container used is 3GP and moving objects in the video don’t have a very smooth motion as it’s not 30fps at this resolution. It's still passable, however, and 720p video fares a lot better. 

Battery life
This was an area of concern for many from the time Micromax announced the A116. A 2000mAh battery powering a 5-inch HD screen and a quad-core SoC did not sound very good. Surprisingly, the Canvas HD managed to deliver 7-hours and 45-minutes of continues video playback. This translates to roughly 14-hours of real world usage, which is not bad all things considered.

Verdict and price in India
The Micromax A116 Canvas HD is available for a bargain price of Rs.13,990, which easily makes it the most powerful smartphone under Rs.15,000 right now. The best part is the powerful specifications on paper actually translate well into real world performance, which makes this very usable as a primary phone. The Canvas HD is lighter and slimmer than the A110, has a much better screen, comes with Jelly Bean, packs in a powerful SoC, 1080p video recording and playback and a surprisingly decent battery life. This makes it a steal at this price point, so no wonder it’s sold out everywhere. Apart from the lack of an OTA update option and the video playback looking a bit dull, there’s very little to complain about here. While we highly recommend the Canvas HD if you can find it, we’re really eager to see XOLO’s A1000. This handset is priced the same as the A116 but features a dual-core SoC instead of quad-core. While this does limit the video playback capabilities to 720p, we should get better battery life and based on XOLO’s previous offerings, we should expect better build and finish as well. It also has the awesome BSI sensor we saw in the A800. For now, the Micromax A116 Canvas HD is the handset to beat in the mid-range price bracket.