Indian smartphone vendor Micromax Informatics has officially launched a new mid-range smartphone as part of its Canvas Nitro series of devices. The Canvas Nitro 4G E455, as it’s called, will have an MSRP of Rs. 10,499, and had been listed earlier this week on Indiatimes Shopping at a price of Rs. 10,430 ($160). The one really interesting aspect of the phone seems to be the fact that it will be one of the very first handsets worldwide, to be powered by Qualcomm’s new generation Snapdragon 415 SoC, which ditches quad-core CPUs found in earlier Snapdragon 4xx series chipsets for an octa-core unit as its processor of choice. The SoC also sees the GPU being bumped up to an Adreno 405 unit, thus far only seen on the Snapdragon 615 chipset.
Coming to more details about the just-launched smartphone’s hardware, the device features a 5-inch 720p IPS OnCell display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 Protection. The Chipset under the hood, as mentioned already, is the Snapdragon 415 SoC, which has an embedded octa-core CPU clocked at a frequency of 1.4 GHz and an Adreno 405 GPU. The handset comes with 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage, which can be expanded by up to 32 GB with the help of a microSD card. The phone comes with Android 5.0 Lollipop pre-installed and carries a 2,500 mAh battery. Connectivity options on the device include 4G LTE and 3G HSPA+ alongside Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS. The supported LTE bands include TD-LTE on 2300 MHz (Band 40) and FDD-LTE on 1800 MHz (Band 3). The phone also comes with dual SIM support and an FM radio. While the primary camera on the Canvas Nitro 4G E455 is a 13-megapixel unit that comes with an LED flash, the front camera happens to be a 5-megapixel unit.
Mr. Vineet Taneja, CEO of Micromax, had this to say on the occasion of the phone’s launch: “India is at the tipping point of 4G revolution and we expect the consumers to skip 3G and directly leap forward to 4G LTE connectivity. With the launch of Canvas Nitro 4G, we aim to bring a perfect combination of technology, rich features and a faster 4G experience at a great value to more and more consumers. As pioneers in democratizing technology, we at Micromax believe this product will take the 4G adoption in India to a new level. The launch is just the starting point and will be followed by a full range of best value 4G devices from Micromax”.
