Micromax Canvas HD: The phone that CAN, now in HD

New Delhi: Micromax’s new flagship phone, the A116 aka Canvas HD has been unleashed in Indian markets at a pretty price tag of Rs 13,990. The Canvas HD comes in as a direct successor to its major out-selling smartphone, the Micromax Canvas 2 A110.

The Canvas HD will be labelled under the ‘phablet’ category.

Reports have emerged that the Canvas HD is already selling fast like hot cake. Surprisingly, the phone which was launched on the midnight of February 14 exceeded bookings of 25 units per minute!

Micromax in a statement on Saturday declared that its newly released phone has already sold 9,000 units online in less than 24 hours of its debut. 

The company has teamed up with Snapdeal.com for the sale of its A116 smartphone. Unluckily, the phablet is out of stock. 

Smartphone aficionados have waited with bated breath for the release of the Canvas HD since the previous Canvas phone, too, remains readily unavailable in major stores and online retailers. 

But before you convince yourself, and others, to get a crack at the Canvas HD, let’s take a look at some of the features that this new phablet carries:


Processor

The Canvas HD is powered by a 1.2 GHz quad-core MediaTek’s MT6589 Cortex-A7 processor, unlike the one on the A110 which sported a 1GHz Scorpion Adreno 200. Judging by the change in processor unit, from dual core to quad core, the new phone has all the capabilities to handle heavy apps and other operations. 

Display

What Micromax has brought to the table is the advent of larger, more expansive screen estate. The screen size also accounts for the bulk of the interest generated in these phones as users are steadily shifting their attention to touchscreens and apps. The display on the Canvas HD is probably one of the major talking points about the phablet. 

A massive 5.0-inch (12.7 cm) IPS LCD capacitive display with 1280×720 pixels and 294 ppi pixel density breaks free from the A110’s 5.0 TFT capacitive screen. While the Canvas had 480 x 854 pixels on its screen the 1280 x 720 pixels on the Canvas HD account for brighter, fluent and sharper features. Users can expect better viewing angles along with crisp image quality with little or no saturation.


Battery

With bigger screen sizes come bigger batteries, and having an HD screen on the phone results in major battery drainage. Android phones aren’t generally famed for their battery support; nevertheless, a bigger battery size is handy. The 2,000 mAh Li-Ion battery in the Canvas HD is capable of 5 hours of talk time while the stand by time is kept at 174 hours. 

This isn’t a shift from the earlier battery on the A110 but a phone with an HD display demands better battery backup.


Operating System

The stock OS on the Canvas HD is Android Jelly Bean 4.1 and has a planned upgrade in the works to Jelly Bean 4.2. Many of Micromax’s phones come with the latest OS upgrade Google Android has to offer. The A110 Canvas 2 was no exception with its Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The lucid and flowing interface of Jelly Bean 4.1 will be appreciated by new and old users while using the Canvas HD.


Storage

The Canvas HD has 4GB internal memory which is expandable up to 32GB. While both phones, the A110 and A116 have 4GB of internal storage the Canvas HD has twice the RAM its predecessor had. Lagging issues will be handled with the increase in RAM and functioning will become smoother and the phone more responsive.


With the release of Canvas HD, Micromax also plans to launch 30 smartphones this year as a part of its aggressive marketing strategy of increasing its smartphone inventory.

Micromax also unveiled the Bolt A35 on Valentine’s Day, the first phone in the Bolt series which has its own file transferring option called Flash Transfer’

Interestingly, the Canvas HD has found a competitor in the Xolo A1000 which was released on Friday. The two phones mirror each other very closely with the minor exception of the battery being bigger on the Xolo A1000. 

With similar specs, one could expect that the two phones will be dancing around each other for weeks!

Micromax A116 Canvas HD selling 25 units per minute

Micromax had recently launched its A116 Canvas HD smartphone. The smartphone was available for pre-booking from company's website and through the deal site snapdeal.com, and a total of 9,000 units were sold out in just 24 hours. As per company's claims this smartphone is being booked at a pace of 25 units per minute.

Shedding more light on the trend, Snapdeal.com has shared that the first lot of the A116 Canvas HD was sold out within 15 minutes of announcing the sale at midnight of 14 February 2013. The second lot which consisted of 300 units and was up for sale at 9:00 AM to was sold out within 15 minutes and the third lot of 1,200 phones took about 45 minutes to be sold out.

Just to recap, Micromax A116 Canvas HD come with 5-inch HD IPS screen that sports 1280x720 resolution and a colour depth of 16.7 million. Micromax A116 Canvas HD is powered by MediaTek's MT6589 quad-core processor that clocks 1.2GHz. It runs on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) out of the box. It packs in a 2000mAh battery.

For camera, there is an 8-megapixel rear shooter with LED flash and 4X zoom and a VGA front camera. Other features of the smartphone include 1GB RAM and 4GB of internal storage, which can be expanded to up to 32GB via microSD card. It is a dual-SIM GSM + GSM smartphone.

 Commenting on the sales, Shubhodip Pal, CMO Micromax, said, "The response from our consumers has been phenomenal and the demand has been increasing every passing minute. After the unprecedented success of the Canvas 2, we are overwhelmed with the customer response for Canvas HD. This is the first time our online sales partners have ever witnessed a digital queue in cyberspace to such an extent for any product, to the traditional cue one normally sees. The data also shows that 60% of the orders received online have come from the metros."

He further added, "It was great to witness consumers wait until 12:00am for their chance to book the Canvas HD on Valentine's Day. We expect the sales of this device to touch a new high in the coming weeks which will soon be available for sale at all leading retail stores in the country. We hope to further strengthen our leadership in the new phablet category in India."

Commenting on the sales Tony Navin, Vice President - Business Development, Snapdeal.com said, "This product, one of the most awaited launches exceeded our expectations by a huge margin. We took this live at midnight and we were completely surprised to see all 500 units which we expected to sell in the entire day sold out within 15 minutes of launch. Our call volume shot through the roof with enquiries and we have replenished inventory levels to cater to more sales. In a category such as Mobiles, this kind of pace of sales beats our previous records that we have witnessed. Our partnership with Micromax is now more than a year old and has been one of the most exciting journeys for both the parties. We look forward to such meaningful associations in the future as well".

Micromax has shared that they are now looking at replenishing the stock at the earliest but did not mention the exact availability date for the same.

Samsung Ativ S review

If I asked you to name a manufacturer of Windows Phone-based handsets it is very likely that you’d come up with Nokia. The company has plenty of models available, and it has worked hard in its partnership with Microsoft to offer some good software add-ons that help its brand stand out.

But of course others are producing Windows Phone handsets too, and Samsung has just joined them. Samsung is rather late to the Windows Phone 8 party, but that doesn’t stop the Ativ S being a smashing phone with a lot going for it. The absence of LTE support is irritating, but there’s a lot more here that’s very nice.

 The Ativ S is a big phone – the largest of any to run Windows Phone 8, in fact. The Super AMOLED screen measures 4.8in thereby just about beating Nokia’s 4.5in Lumia 920, and it houses 1,280 x 720 pixels. It’s the same screen found in the Galaxy S3, in fact, and it is obvious why Samsung has chosen to resurrect it here – it’s a pleasure to work with. If anything, Super AMOLED works better with Windows Phone than Android because the big blocks of colour that make up the tile-based interface respond much better than the Android interface to the bright sharp rendering on offer. Video looks great too and, well, you get the idea.

Having mentioned the Galaxy S3 I should continue with the comparisons. Some might say the Ativ S is a very similar looking phone, but in fact it isn’t. It is similar in size, sure, and Samsung has opted for a physical Windows button that takes you to the Start Screen just as it opts for a Home button on the Galaxy S3. Here the flanking touch buttons are back and search, incidentally. The reflective Windows Phone symbol on the physical button looks a little cheap and cheerful for my taste, and sadly it is not backlit. It’s an odd aberration, and a very visible one, in what is otherwise a pretty stylish physical design.

The backplate is very thin and flimsy, but the fake metal finish to the plastic material looks great. The grill towards the bottom of the back covers the speaker, which in turn produces audio that's too heavy on the treble for my taste and tends to distort at top volume. This grill also has a fake metal finish.

The fake metal concept extends to a long plate at the bottom of the back that melds into the edging. This has been given a chrome-like makeover and it's the only part of the metal lie that doesn’t quite work. Plastic with a chrome finish just never seems convincing.

The chassis has a has squarer and blockier appearance than that of the Galaxy S3, though the overall dimensions of the two handsets are remarkably similar – the Ativ S measures 137.2 x 70.52 x 8.7mm, while the Galaxy S3 is almost identical at 136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6mm.

Button and connector placement is completely unremarkable. The headset slot is on the top edge, micro-USB on the bottom. A smallish volume rocker is on the left, main power and camera shortcut on the right. Under the backplate there’s a slot for your microSIM and another for microSD, both of which can be got at without the need to remove the battery.

You get 16GB of built in storage, and that microSD card slot lets you add up to 32GB more, so there are none of those old issues about being unable to expand Windows Phone storage here.

Samsung has used a 2,300mAh battery in the Ativ S, and it did a pretty good job of keeping the phone alive. Placing it under an average (for me) burden that included some web browsing, email syncing, calls and even a little gaming, it saw me through a working day. If you are a heavy user, or listen to music on the commute, you’ll probably need to find mains power during the day.

The 8-megapixel main camera benefits from a flash, and I found photos to be perfectly acceptable in terms of both colour depth and quality. However, I still carry a dedicated camera most of the time and use a cameraphone for tweetable photos and the like rather than anything I want to keep long term. There is a 1.2-megapixel front camera, too, for those interested in video-calling or taking pictures of themselves.

The dual-core Qualcomm processor, which is supported by 1GB of RAM, might sound behind the times when compared to the quad-core processors that support top-grade Android handsets, but I had no complaints about the responsiveness or speed of the Ativ S. In both cases, it performed well and did not let me down. As befits a high-end handset these days NFC is built in. It’s a pity, though, that there’s no LTE support.

I’ve said before that if you want software extras to lift the standard out-of-the-box Windows Phone 8 experience, then Nokia’s Lumia range is probably where you should be looking. Samsung has not changed my view with the bundle it supplies on the Ativ S. Yes, there are some extras here, but nothing that’s a deal-maker, I'm afraid.

You get Samsung Now, which is just an aggregator for weather, news (from Yahoo! News), stocks (from Yahoo! Finance), currency conversion, and an odd Top Tweets service that delivers tweets from several countries including France, Germany and Italy, but not the UK.

Live Wallpaper is a fairly nice app that lets you choose up to 12 photos for the lock screen. I rather like this one as it helps you personalise things and get away from Windows Phone 8’s otherwise samey look across handsets. It is really easy to use which means you might be encouraged to change photo sets regularly.

MiniDiary lets you gather information in one place and can accommodate notes, photos and voice recordings. Personally, I’d install Evernote instead. Music Hub gives you some music related extras and is built around a store. Photo Editor will for some be the star of the show as it gives you a range of useful image editing facilities.

Samsung has also taken the opportunity to pre-install ChatON, its IM application. It does the job well enough but your contacts will also need to be on ChatON for you to take advantage of it. The same goes for Family Story, an app designed for sharing photos, notes and events with owners of other Samsung devices. You need a (free) Samsung account to use it.

To be honest, the pre-installed apps won't draw you to the Ativ S. The good battery life, nice design and plentiful (and expandable memory) are the key features in that respect.

Verdict

At the time of writing this, Samsung’s Ativ S is the Windows Phone 8 handset with the largest screen, and the screen is bright, clear and a real eye-catcher. Slick operation under the fingers, NFC, plenty of memory and a generally stylish physical design are all additional points in its favour.

Specifications

Manufacturer and model	Samsung Ativ S
Network	GSM 850/900/1800/1900 HSDPA 850/900/1900/2100
Processor	Qualcomm 1.5GHz dual-core
RAM	1GB
Built-in memory/memory expansion	16GB or 32GB/microSD
Display	4.8in, 1,280 x 720 pixels
Main camera	8-megapixel
Front camera	1.2-megapixel
Wi-Fi	Yes
GPS	Yes
FM radio	No
Battery	2,300mAh
Size	137.2 x 70.52 x 8.7mm
Weight	135g
OS	Windows Phone 8

Samsung to drive growth of new Tizen OS in 2013

Call it a hedge. According to Businessweek, Samsung has said that it will bring out "new, competitive" phones based on the Tizen OS this year, giving the world's largest mobile-phone maker a modern, in-house alternative to operating systems controlled by Google and Microsoft.

Samsung's declined to confirm the Businessweek story, but it's perfectly plausible, and I suspect the response I got came because it's the middle of the night in Seoul and they can't get anyone at headquarters to respond right now.

Samsung is a smartphone giant, but it's mostly dependent on others for its mobile platforms. The company makes dozens of different models powered by Google's Android, including its successful Galaxy S line. Samsung also built a range of Windows Phone 7 devices, before turning lukewarm on Windows Phone 8 with a single phone (the Ativ S/Ativ Odyssey).

But the company understands that you're vulnerable if you're entirely dependent on others. So, a while ago, Samsung developed bada, a quasi-smartphone OS that found some success. In the third quarter of 2012, bada had a 3 per cent global market share, beating Symbian and Windows Phone, according to Gartner.

The bada effort merged into Tizen, which had already swept up a bunch of other Linux-based OS efforts including Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin (which together became MeeGo) as well as the Linux Foundation's LiMo.

Samsung's support for Tizen puts the OS leagues ahead of other new mobile OS projects such as Firefox OS, the brand-new Ubuntu for Phones and Jolla's Sailfish OS, none of which are available on any current devices. We've heard previously about a ZTE Firefox phone and a Jolla phone coming in 2013, but Firefox isn't so far a core OS for ZTE, and Jolla is tiny.

Still, Tizen's partners have made promises they haven't delivered upon. At CES last year, Intel said it would "move a lot faster" and that Tizen tablets might appear in 2012. That didn't happened.

On 31 December, 2012, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said Samsung's Tizen phones would come to Japan's largest wireless carrier, NTT DoCoMo. There's been no word yet on Tizen's future plans for the UK - its 2012 bada phones made it to the UK, with the Wave Y is available on PAYG from Phones 4u, so we'll assume we're in the picture until we hear otherwise.

Samsung also hasn't given any details on the timing or specific models of upcoming Tizen phones.