Micromax Canvas Spark 3: A Well-Designed, Affordable Smartphone

Micromax an Indian smartphone manufacturer company grown significantly over the last three years, but now it's facing some literally tough competition by Chinese brands like Xiaomi on both specs and price. But recently Micromax launched Canvas Spark 3 Q385 a successor of Canvas spark 2 at very competitive price i.e. INR. 4,999. Micromax tries to make the low-end smartphone as much as possible so that everyone can afford smartphones especially the peoples from non-urban areas.

Things it offers

Micromax built this device to offer a rich multimedia experience for people with tight budget. This phone offers a big 5.5-inch IPS HD display with on-screen navigation buttons. The top of the display is accomplished with earpiece grill followed by a 5 MP front camera and a couple of sensors. The whole body of the phone is completely made up of plastic. The phone back panel is made of soft matte finish plastic which is removable and not looks too much cheap. The 8 Mp rear camera and flash are up top, with a Micromax logo below and if you go towards the bottom you will find a large speaker grill. The phone is light in weight and pretty comfortable to use and hold. A curvy metallic strip is running across the sides of the phone to enhance the look. You'll find the power and volume buttons on the right, the audio socket on top, and the Micro-USB port at the bottom. Under the back cover, it has two Micro-SIM slots and a micro-SD above the non-removable battery. Overall the design pretty good under this budget range.

Under the hood, it is powered by 1.3 GHz Quad core processor Spreadtrum SC7731 SoC with Mali-400 MP GPU and 1 GB RAM for multitasking and gaming. It runs on Android 5.1 lollipop with Micromax customized UI skinned on top. It has two launchers- one is Indus Launcher which is set as default by the company and another is Android” Launcher 3“. The difference between in these two is Launcher 3 has the app drawer whereas Indus Launcher keeps all apps on the home screen. If we talk about storage, the phone has 8 GB internal storage out of which you will get around 4GB free space to use. As it supports micro-SD card that means you can expand your storage up to 32 GB, unfortunately, this  phone does not support USB-OTG.

Things you want to know before purchasing it

Coming to the Phone performance, the spark 3 can handle your daily usage app such as WhatsApp, Gmail, Instagram etc. But you won’t expect too much from this phone as it shows some lags while shifting from one app to another (running some apps at background). In the gaming section, it can handle light games without any significant lags but don’t think to run the heavy graphics games on it such as Asphalt. But we think, what it provides at this price point is really fair. The phone doesn’t heat up much which is a good thing.

About the camera, the Canvas Spark 3 is packed with an 8 megapixel autofocus rear camera with LED Flash, and a 5 megapixel front-facing a camera. The camera autofocus and shutter speed are slow. The photos captured are good in daylight but you can’t expect much detailing and sharpness. On the other hand, the low-light or night shots are not good as they come up with graininess. The good thing in the camera is “on tap focus”, it easily shifted the focus to blurred the object.

The handset is backed by a non-removable 2500mAh battery and it last for 3 hours and 15 minutes in our video loop test. This phone can last for 8 to 10 hours with average multitasking and social networking.