The Micromax Canvas Pulse 4G is exclusively available with Flipkart. We spent a few days with it, to know whether it is worth a buy or not. This is what we found out.
. . Design and camera
. . Micromax’s new smartphone in its Canvas series, Pulse 4G, is rectangular in shape with rounded corners. Out of the box, we found this phone to be quite sturdy.
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The front of the smartphone is dominated by its 5-inch HD IPS display with the phone’s speaker and selfie camera above it and the haptic keys below it. The right and the left edges of the phone sport the power and the volume rocker buttons.
. . The Micromax Canvas Pulse 4G comes with a removable back panel that covers the dual sim card slots along with the microSD card slot and the 2, 100mAh battery. To sum it up, the phone sports a solid built and is attractive to look at.
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The display of the smartphone, although reflective, offered vibrant colours and good viewing angles. We also found it to be responsive and there wasn’t any noticeable pixilation.
. . Speaking about Micromax Canvas Pulse 4G’s 13MP camera, it took decent pictures outdoors. However, same cannot be said for indoor shots. Other than that, there was no problem whatsoever in the colours of the objects. The selfie camera too does a good job and the quality of images goes up once the beauty feature is turned on. A must try for selfie lovers.
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Performance and hardware
. . The Micromax Canvas Pulse 4G runs Android 5.1 Lollipop, with no customization. Unlike most other phones in this price range, the smartphone has a dedicated app drawer and comes preloaded with a number of apps like Amazon, Saavn, Snapdeal, Quikr, hike, etc. The phone also has pre-installed games like Monster Truck Saga and Temple Paradise. When we tried to uninstall these apps, we could do it without facing any problem.
. . However, Micromax’s own app centre, Trending Apps, could not be uninstalled. In fact, it also had a widget on the homescreen of the phone, which kept showing different apps one may wish to download. This is something that many smartphone makers do in the budget category. Most of these apps are not useful and they just end up hogging premium screen space and memory. Barring that, the software/user interface of the phone was easy to use.
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Moving to under the hood performance, the Micromax Canvas Pulse 4G is powered by 1.3 GHz Octa-Core processor and comes with 3GB RAM. It also offers 16GB of internal storage to the users and can hold microSD cards of up to 32GB. The smartphone also comes with 4G, 3G, 2G, GPRS/EDGE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth v4.1.
. . The phone’s performance was decent, although there are areas ( like app boot times) where it can improve. We faced no problem when we opened various windows of Chrome tabs, which was the default browser of Pulse 4G, however, when we opened multiple apps, the phone did slow down a bit.
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Some apps also crashed on the smartphone, a problem that we haven’t faced with other phones in the same price range. This really hampered the user experience. Also, if you are a gamer, this phone is probably not for you. While we were not surprised when we faced problems in playing games like Asphalt 8, it was a disappointment when the phone heated up when we tried to play Angry Birds.
. . The call quality of the phone was good and we did not experience any issue even when we used the phone in places with low signal reception like elevators and basements. The GPS of the phone worked fine, but the phone started heating up ( again) after a prolonged use of maps. Micromax Canvas Pulse 4G is not alone here, this is a problem faced by most phones in this category.
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. . The smartphone packs a 2, 100mAh battery, which didn’t last us the entire day with normal phone usage involving voice calling, and social networking. The battery got drained even more quickly when we played games on the phone.
4G was an above average performer. However, there was nothing about the phone that is extraordinary. We have seen better smartphones in the same price range like Lenovo K-3 Note, and even the recently launched InFocus M680 surpasses it in performance.Micromax Canvas Pulse 4G left us with a mixed bag of emotions. While the design of the smartphone is good and the pictures clicked from its cameras were decent, the battery and the performance could have been better.
Micromax E451 Canvas Pulse 4G Grey