Micromax Evok Power Review: Decent design, impressive battery but average performer in its range

Micromax is known or has a reputation for offering budget smartphones. While this is the case, within the past couple of months the company has been quite dormant and we have not seen anything extravagant from the local manufacturer.

PROS

• unique anti-shock design
• impressive battery life
• budget friendly

CONS

• Bloatwares / /
• sluggish at times
• display with really thick bezels

But the situation seems to be changing. As Chinese manufacturers have been quite vocal with their products, it looks like Micromax has been working hard behind the scenes on planning a better strategy as well as developing enticing smartphones for the consumers.

And it appears they have done a good job recently: they're finally making some likable product.

Well, Micromax has recenlty launched the Evok Power at Rs 6,999 and it is one of the smartphones from Micromax's new Evok online-only series. Talk about strategy here. However, the new smartphone does bring in some interesting features like big battery, sturdy design amongst others.

But will it be enough to make this smartphone a unique product in the competitive online market? Let's dive into the review of this samrtphone and get a better understanding if Micromax Evok Power can actually make the cut or not.

Unique Design

Well Micromax Evok Power sports a design that is immediately familiar. But then again, when it comes to smartphones these days the current choices for staying on trend are limited. You can either use an all-metal back or go with glass. And these days we see more of a metal unibody design in most of the devices, typically the Chinese smartphones, however the Evok Power has a unique anti-shock design.

This smartphone has a rubberized strip running on its sides. And this basically helped us in having a strong grip over the phone and at the same time this feature does make the phone resistant to accidental drops and resulting damages. On the whole, Micomax has built a phone that's both attractive to look at and pleasant to hold in the hand.

Coming to the display, the smartphone sports a 5-inch HD display and has good viewing angles, is bright, and visible under sunlight. The display also comes with 2.5D curved-edge Corning Gorilla Glass on top which also has a plastic frame around it. One thing that we did not like that much is that the display has really thick bezels which take away the charm of the decently-styled smartphone.

At the rear, the samrtphone has a removable back case. Apart from that, the camera sits near the top, placed centrally above an LED flash ring and the fingerprint scanner.

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There are no capacitive buttons and you will have make do with on-screen controls.

As far as other ports, switches and buttons go, they're in the places you'd expect to find them. The top part features the micro USB and the 3.5mm audio port, the loudspeaker grille is the rear bottom and the power button and volume rockers live on the right side of the phone, and the SIM tray lives inside the removable back cover..

Customized Software

Well, the smartphone runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow and while Micromax brings in a decent UI and we also did not notice ant drastic changes. But there are a few customization options that the company has added. Strangely the quick toggles can be accessed in two ways. The first is the by swiping down from the top of the screen. The other is by swiping up from the bottom which brings up an iOS-like Control Center.

However, the one thing we didi not like is that we had to deal with was the addition of bloatware. The smartphone also comes with a lot of pre-installed app but it can be uninstalled.

One app from Micromax dubbed as Around app is quite useful and it aggregates data for different services like hotels, ticketing and cabs, and presents relevant information based on the location. Data Iis pulled from the Internet from multiple service providers. The app can be accessed from the home screen by swiping left.

Manageable Performance

The Micromax Evok Power comes with decent specs and you cannot expect more at such price range. As such the smartphone is powered by a 1.3GHz Quad-Core MediaTek MT6737 processor with Mali-T720 GPU. The setup is further paired with 2GB of RAM.

Well, looking at these specs it is not going to sett any performance records but in day-to-day use, the Evok Power works fine. However we did notice some occasional lags sometimes. Light weighted games run quite smoothly but they do take sometime to load. Moreoevr, talking about multi tasking, the limited RAM means the device will stutter or pause for a breath.

Likewise, unlocking the phone using the fingerprint sensor was not so instantaneous. One some occasions the sensor did fail to read the fingerprints and we got the unmatched fingerprint message. Micromax could work on this department as fingerprint scanners are becomnig standard on smartphones these days.

Talking about the audio performance the smartphone does a decent job in producing soothing sounding music without consuming a lot of power.

All in all if you aim to use the phone primarily as a communications device, the Evok Power should be able to suffice your needs but just keep in mind that it is not a multimedia powerhouse. Here's a few performance benchmarks scores that you can have look at.

Impressive Battery life

Battery life is one important aspect that some of the smartphones seem to be lacking inspite of all the high-end features. However, in case of Micromax Evok Power, this device's processing power is backed by a 4000mAh battery.

Well, the battery did perform well and it did provide enough juice to get through a full day without issue. We did not get far into a second day and had to put the device for charge again. We tested the device with extensive usage pattern. However, with light usage the battery delivers 2 days of standby time.

The downside of having a bigger battery, well once the battery life was depleted, it took nearly three hours to fully charge the device.

Decent Camera Performance

Well, the Micromax Evok Power is equipped with an 8MP rear camera with a single LED flash and a 5MP front camera. So how do these cameras perform?

Before going into the performance aspect, let's quickly talk about the smartphone's camera interface and the software. Well honestly it is very basic and there are few modes provides like Limited HDR, Face Beauty and Panorama. Interestingly the camera app has a gesture capture feature to help take photos, but it does not work accurately all the time.

Coming to the camera performance photos taken with the Evok Power in daylight are decent. The images do lack detail in zooming in and its not that sharp. Macro shots are quite good though. You can check the samples below.

However, camera performance drops in low light. Further the shutter lag results in blurry images. There is a grainy texture and we could capture moving objects.

As for the video, the smartphone captures video at a resolution of 1280x720. The phone supports continuous autofocus while recording. It does have an EIS (Electronic Image Stabilization) but we did not see any significant difference in the result.

The 5-megapixel selfie camera gets toggles for HDR and Face Beauty modes and images captured from the camera is decent. The front camera can record at HD resolution which is a good feature.

End results, in most instances, Low-light scenes kind of pose some trouble, with little image noise creeping in. Well the Micromax Evok Power has a decent camera and does not necessarily stand out.

Verdict

Well, with Evok Power Micromax has taken the game up in terms of design and battery performance. Battery life surely stands out and it might be Evok Power's greatest feature. This could be the major selling factor for this smartphone. All in all, it is a quality product with acceptable hardwares and few shortcomings at such price range.

Besides, one honest opinion, Micromax Evok Power is not at all perfect as there are still bloatwares and the occasional drops in touch response but considering the past smartphones from the company this new smartphone does get a lot of things right than wrong.

That being said, a question arises, "A company to watch for the future?" Certainly. Improvements can be made with the upcoming smartphones and we believe that Micromax will be stepping up its game in the days ahead.