canvas turbo Design and Features

Design and build
After taking the phone out of its Apple-esque packaging, the Turbo comes across as well built and feels great to hold. The aluminium chassis feels durable and there isn’t any chrome to mess up the aesthetics. The upper and bottom sections around the back are plastic for the radios to work and these have the tendency to pop open from the sides if you drop the phone from waist height. It’s probably a good idea to have a cover on at all times. The buttons have a good tactile feedback but the area around the SIM slots have a crude finish and don’t sit flush with the phone.

A much better attempt compared to its predecessor

 There are the usual slots all around the phone, including two micro-SIM slots. Memory expansion is sorely missed however as that’s something we’ve taken as a given in Chinese phones. Due to the aluminium chassis, the battery is also non-removable. Overall, we think Turbo is a marked improvement over the Canvas 4 in terms of aesthetics and build quality. We’ll still give a nod in Gionee’s direction for the E6 for aesthetics and attention to detail but that’s just our personal opinion.

The 13MP shooter

Features
The Canvas Turbo uses Sharp’s Continuous Grain Silicon (CGS) technology which enables lower power consumption and more components like the display controller and LCD interface to be integrated into the panel. This reduces the need for extra components to be connected to the display which makes room for a more compact and slimmer phone. The Full HD resolution of the IPS panel also provides crisper text and sharper colours. The display is bright and sunlight legibility is pretty good as well. There doesn’t seem to be any scratch-resistant protection however which is a little worrying.

Some new handy features

The A250 uses stock Jelly Bean as much as possible apart from a different icon set and few of their own apps. The UI is smooth and not as laggy as Gionee’s offering but it’s still not ‘Project Butter’ smooth. Along with ‘Blow-to-Unlock’, we now have an app called ‘ifloat’ which lets you quickly access some apps no matter what you’re doing or which app you’re in. This app also enables a Facebook Chat Heads-style alert for missed calls and messages. You can reply directly from these pop-ups without having to switch apps, which is cool. There are also a whole bunch of gestures to play around with.



Coming to some of the specifications, the Turbo is powered by the MediaTek MT6589T quad-core chipset, running at 1.5GHz. There’s also 2GB of RAM onboard so performance in benchmarks is pretty much the same as we’ve already seen in the Elife E6.  

Media
Micromax hasn’t changed much in the audio and video department as it’s exactly the same as the Canvas 4. What we really liked is the volume level and quality of the loud speaker, which is very good.

Media playback is pretty good

We also get the Samsung-esque video player with oversized controls and features like ‘Look Away’ and the pop-out video player. We easily managed to play a 1080p video while chatting on Whatsapp in the background without any discernable lag. The default video player managed to read most video formats with ease from MOV to MKV. FM radio is also present. Out of the 16GB of internal memory, there’s 12.4GB that’s available for the end-user. While this may be an issue considering there’s no expandable memory, the iPhone 5 on iOS7 leaves you with about 13.1GB (16GB model) and we don’t see people complaining, so that’s that.