New Delhi: Micromax, which has made a name for itself in the low-cost handset market in India, seems to have made the best of its experience in the A90 by striking a right balance between performance and price. The Micromax A90 Pixel Android smartphone was recently launched at Rs 12,990.
The Micromax A90 is a neatly tailored dual SIM phone. The design of the phone is reminiscent of Samsung's highly successful Galaxy SII. The phone is slim and light in weight. Aping the Galaxy SII's form means that it brings some of the design advantages of the Samsung bestseller. The A90 is comfortable to hold.
Micromax has opted for the full touch design with on-screen home and back buttons to take advantage of the Android Ice Cream Sandwich UI. The phone neither has any hardware button on the front nor any capacitive controls generally found below the display. The back has a textured panel, which protects the rear of the phone from abrasions and also prevents it from slipping out of the palm. The phone looks tidy and the overall build quality is satisfactory.
The Micromax A90 Pixel has a volume rocker and a power key on the sides. The phone lacks a dedicated camera key. Another thing that I found missing on the phone was an LED notification light. Beyond this the design and the hardware leaves very little to grumble for.
The USP of the phone is its 4.3-inch AMOLED screen that offers a resolution of 800x480 pixels. It is a display technology, which is generally found on higher-end phones. The inclusion of the AMOLED display on this budget phone is the surprise. The display produces good colours. The screen is also readable under the direct sunlight. The touch is quite responsive and the navigation on the phone in smooth. While the company does not claim the screen to be scratch-resistant, but compared to other phones that we have tested, this phone barely got any scratches during the review period that lasted for around a week.
The phone runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system. One thing that I found a bummer was the absence of the Google Talk app on this phone, which generally comes pre-installed on Android phones. And the catch here is that the Google Talk app is not even available on Google Play. So, it means you can not even download it. However, you can use the Google Plus messenger app on your phone as an alternative.
The Micromax A90 is powered by a 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM and manages multi-tasking with ease. It let me run 4 to 5 apps at a time. I listened to music and browsed the Internet, while downloading apps from the Google Play store at a same time. A few other apps were also running in the background.
The phone supports 720p video playback, but stutters when confronted by 1080p videos. It supports mp4, mkv and avi file formats for video playback. The phone's 512MB RAM can limit heavy users, but then this is a budget device.
The phone offer 4GB of internal storage, out of which around 2.5GB is user-accessible, and of which around 500MB is dedicated for internal app storage. This means that apps which due to security or performance reasons are installable only in the internal storage have around half-a-gigabyte of space. This may prove to be insufficient for power users. Further, its memory is expandable up to 32GB using a microSD card.
The phone features an 8 megapixel rear camera with an LED flash that captures satisfactory snaps in both low-light and bright-light conditions. The camera offers you various options to customise images. Zoom in and zoom out are a little jerky. It also has a 0.3 megapixel front camera, which surprised me with its quality. I was not expecting much form a 0.3 megapixel front camera.
The phone's signal reception is strong and the calling experience on this phone is fair but the phone's speakers while producing crisp sound is not loud enough. The loudness of the speakers is satisfactory in quite places, but in noisy surroundings it failed to impress.
The phone comes with a 1600mAh battery. If you are a heavy user and use scores of apps on your phone, then it can easily last for around 9 hours. But if put to normal use, the phone has enough juice to last for a day.
The Micromax A90 Pixel offers impressive features at an attractive price and finds a place on our recommended list.
Pros
+ Good display
+ Impressive design (though the phone looks like an SII clone)
+ Satisfactory performance
+ Quality camera
+ Attractive price
Cons
- No Google Talk app
- Average speakers
- No dedicated camera key
Rating: 4/5
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