Micromax A116 Canvas HD – Powerful CPU, 5inch HD display & better Battery [Review]

The Micromax A116 Canvas HD is the successor to the earlier Micromax Canvas A110 Canvas 2. Micromax has significantly upgraded the phone with an HD Screen, quad-core processor and has doubles the on-board RAM.

One of the first things you’ll notice on the Micromax A116 is that the front is black while the removable back panel is white in colour. This panel extends to the sides of the phone and makes for a very unique looking device. The Micromax A116 has a very solid feel to it. The body is finished in matte plastic and feels very comfortable to hold in the hands. The device has physical buttons on the sides which control the volume and the screen on/off. These buttons feel very robust and the overall feel of the phone is of a very sturdy handset.

The phone comes with a 5 inch HD IPS display sporting wide viewing angles. Text, images and videos appear quite sharp. The only this we would have liked is Gorilla Glass but the display looks pretty sturdy as it is. However, the screen clarity and visibility goes down in direct sunlight, something all devices in this segment suffer from. The Micromax A116 runs Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean. Micromax has customized certain features of the interface to its own liking such as the app icons and the notification tray. The notification tray includes toggles for the various settings that can be customized as well as a SIM selection toggle. There are five customizable home screens that can be filled with app shortcuts and widgets.

The Micromax A116 has an 8MP camera with LED flash. Images shot in daylight appear quite clear and focused. Images shot in the dark do appear a tad bit unclear and the light source streaks across the image. The front facing video camera is okay for video conferencing. The Micromax A116 Canvas HD is powered by a 1.2GHz MediaTek MT6589 quad-core processor with 1GB RAM and also includes aPowerVR SGX544MP chip for processing graphics. There is 4GB of internal storage, which is expandable up to 32GB via a microSD card. The phone performs very well against comparable handsets and runs a variety of apps without any problems.

The Micromax A116 comes with a 200mAh battery that lasts around 12.5 hours in normal usage. Turning on Wi-Fi reduces the battery life by an hour or so, but the overall performance more than meets expectations.

The Micromax A116 offers great value with a fantastic processor, HD screen and a more than satisfactory battery life. The camera was a bit disappointing and this is the only major flaw in an otherwise great handset.

The review is penned by experts at Reliance Digital.