Micromax A50 Superfone Ninja Review

Budget Android phones are coming in by the dozen and this latest one by Micromax comes with a dedicated voice recognition feature onboard. Dubbed Aisha, which stands for Artificial Intelligence Speech Handset Assistant, this feature is taking on the likes of Siri. The A50 ‘Superfone Ninja’’ as Micromax has named it, comes in at a super price tag, but we’ve seen it numerous times in the past – a significant reduction in the price tag has resulted in a significant reduction in the usability factor of the phone. Let’s find out if this Ninja can hack away at that notion.

Check out a quick video review of the Micromax A50 Superfone Ninja:

Check out AISHA, Micromax's answer to Siri on their A52

Design and Build Quality 

The Superfone Ninja has a plastic body that gives a feeling that the parts will fall apart pretty soon. The A50 scores almost nil marks in terms of build and design, but keeping the price factor in mind, this comes as no surprise. The phone comes dressed in white with a silver border along the edges, but is uninspiring at best. It’s incredibly glossy and fingerprints pose a big problem to the screen. Let’s take a quick tour of the device.

The ports

The A50 comes with a 3.1-inch display with a lowly resolution of 240 x 320 pixels. Below the screen there are three physical backlit buttons. Along the left we have the microUSB port and the volume rocker. The top consists of a difficult to find power button, along with a poorly designed 3.5mm slot that forces you to literally push in your 3.5mm headphone jack, causing you to worry that either the slot or the jack will break. This could be a problem with only our handset, but that's some major design flaw. Under the hood, you have dual-SIM support and a microSD card slot along with a 1200 mAh battery. 

From the sides

At a width of 13mm, the Superfone isn’t the thinnest of phones around, but with the tiny form factor, it fits in well in the palm of your hand. However, the build quality isn’t something to write home about. 

Features and Performance

Interface

The Ninja is powered by a 650 MHz processor and has 256 MB of RAM and 512 MB of internal memory, but all of it is not user accessible. It comes with Gingerbread 2.3.6 onboard and the interface is surprisingly quick for a phone that runs on a processor, which most may consider obsolete for an Android device. While that is impressive, the limited internal memory means you’ll soon run out of space, if you intend to download a few apps. The interface tends to turn laggy after prolonged usage and that doesn’t come as a surprise, as we’ve seen that on most budget Androids now. 

Backlit physical buttons

We put the AISHA to test in our synthetic benchmarks and it fared similar to the Galaxy Pocket that we reviewed earlier. It got a Linpack single thread score of 8.6, as compared to the 9 on the Pocket and an AnTuTu score of 2308 beating the Pocket by a couple of hundreds. 

The interface

Media

The A50 comes with a stock media interface that doesn’t offer a visual treat, but it tries to cover that up with a range of enhancements and equalizers, that work pretty well. Music via the bundled headphones is good, but we’ll have to mention the design flaw here, as we were worried we might snap the headphone jack whilst trying to plug it in. 

The media interface

Video playback is limited to the native formats and coupled with the poor display, the A50 doesn’t qualify as a device worthy enough to cater to your personal viewing needs. Colours appear extremely poor and this device reminded us of the 8 bit panels that graced devices in the bygone era.