Micromax Canvas Unite 4 Pro

First Impressions:

That is quite a long name for a phone, so long that you possibly may have to take a breath halfway through it. Jokes aside, the Unite 4 Pro is a good-looking budget phone that does not mock your bank account whenever you take it out of your pocket. There is a fingerprint reader at the back further aiding its will to stand out of the budget bunch. The build is solid, with a hard to remove metal back hiding the microSD and dual SIM slots. One eyesore is the colour, it sports gold.

Display:

If you were expecting a great display as the phone has "Canvas" in its name, because paintings and canvas and art and what not, you will not be disappointed. The 5" 720p IPS panel looks quite good and renders pretty accurate colours. The panel isn't very bright though, requiring you to either bring the phone millimetres away from your face or go under a shade.

Power:

Budget and performance rarely get along, and this example is no different. Power in the Unite 4 Pro comes from a Spreadtrum SC9832 chipset sporting a Quad-core 1.3 GHz Cortex-A7 CPU along with 2GB of RAM. And as expected, the phone chews up all your casual daily apps with ease, but bogs down a bit when a graphics-heavy title like Riptide GP is thrown at it. It holds up well with multitasking between a boat-load of apps, but sacrificed the loading times in the process.

Battery:

Ending a day of moderately high usage at over 60% of juice still remaining intrigued me to try and run through the next day without plugging it in. To my surprise, the Unite 4 Pro, with its 3900mAh battery, went through the second day without leaving me stranded and bored in rush hour traffic.

Camera:

The 8MP rear unit comes with auto-focus and takes fairly decent pictures, with the camera app having minimal shutter lag. Colours are a bit muted but are able to be corrected with a bit of post-processing in a third party app. The front camera is a 5MP unit good enough to make sure all ten million of your selfies are all totally crisp.

SOFTWARE:

The skin on the Android 5.1 Lollipop UI is perhaps the biggest drawback with this phone. Throughout my time with the device, I was unable to figure out how to set the phone on a custom audio profile that would allow me to put the phone on a silent with vibration only setting. There is a lot of bloatware when you turn the phone on for the first time, but all of that can be fixed if you replace the stock OEM launcher with one from the Google store. But word of caution: do it at your own risk.

SPECS:

Display: 5" HD IPS 1280x720

CPU: 1.3 GHz Quad Core

GPU: Mali-400 MP

OS: Android Lollipop 5.1

ROM: 16 GB

RAM: 2 GB

Camera: 8MP Rear + 5MP Front

Battery: 3900 mAh

Sensors: Accelerometer, proximity, fingerprint

Price: Tk. 9,550/-

VERDICT:

The Micromax Canvas Unite 4 Pro, as long as its name might be, has a longer list of pros compared to its cons. It's a good phone looking that feels quite premium for the price you pay for it, and the extra long battery life redeems most of its hiccups with the software.

Photos: Rahin Sadman Islam