Micromax Bling 2 A55 - (Don't) Bring the Bling

small keyboard is not easy to type

Miscellaneous Features
There are the regular features like a voice recorder, calendar (syncs with Google), File manager, FM Radio, Sound Recorder and OfficeSuite which lets you view various types of documents such as DOC, PDF, XLS and PPT. Micromax’s added apps are Mi-Apps, miRoamer, Mobile Guard, munduTV, Moneycontrol and a NetQin Anti-virus software. While Mi-Apps is Micromax’s store for their own set of paid and free apps, miRoamer is an internet radio app that lets you listen to songs from international radio stations via 3G/EDGE. Another app called Saavn is more India-specific and has all Bollywood related stuff like music and information on the latest releases of movies. MunduTV lets you watch streaming TV and includes most of the Hindi and English channels that are broadcast in India. If you’re into the stock market or are always keen on stocks-related information, the Moneycontrol app will help you out with that.

Opera worked quite well

Probably one of the best apps that has been included is WhatsApp which is a free cross-platform messenger. There’s E-buddy as well for those wanting to talk to friends having Java-based handsets. While these apps are handy, I kind of expected something pertaining more to women. Probably something like safety tips at night or maybe an emergency call function, flash light so they could go hunting around in those small but deep purses they carry around etc. They could have added apps that gave information on discounts or even make-up tips perhaps, I'm just saying. What you don't see you can probably find via the Android Marketplace.

Camera
The Bling 2 sports a 3 Megapixel camera which is pretty mundane for low-end smartphones but doesn’t do well in terms of performance. There’s not much detail and colours don’t look very natural either. The indoor shots look a little better but grainy. However there are quite a few settings that can be played around with for some fun. You can change colour effects like Mono, Sepia, Negative and so on. You can also change saturation, contrast and sharpness levels and play around with a few White Balance settings like Incandescant, Cloudy, Daylight etc.

Average image quality

Battery
The battery life of this smartphone is also quite average, with the Bling 2 running for about an entire day with Wi-Fi turned off with about two hours of talk time and a bit of music.

Won't woo the ladies

Verdict
The Bling 2 comes at a price of Rs. 9000 (MOP) which makes it a low-budget 3G smartphone. However, there are many other options that are available now in this price bracket and can perform a lot better than the A55. Even though Micromax specially made the Bling 2 for the 'Venus'-dwellers, it hasn’t really appealed much in terms of design at least and rating it functionality-wise, the Galaxy 3 will cost about the same and there’s Spice Mi-310 as well. If you already have a Bling, this is definitely not a worthy successor.