The spectacular decline of Micromax from its prominent market share was an amalgamation of several things that played against it. Be it the demonetization, exorbitant time to adopt 4G, diverse portfolio across the price segment and fall out of key executives. The home-grown manufacturer lost considerable ground to the key market players like Samsung, Apple, Xiaomi, Vivo. Micromax intends to hit the ground running through dictating a new and improved design philosophy.
Micromax expanded its smartphone line-up with the Infinity N series towards the end of 2018. With N11 and N12 priced around 8-10k Micromax hopes to sway the consumers away from the likes of Chinese brands. With N12 Micromax bring good design, large display, great battery life to the table. Is this enough to rival the segment best? Let’s find out.
Design and Display
The build looks good with glossy plastic at back in a subtle metallic gradient finish, however, it exposes itself to susceptible smudges. With a 6.19-inch HD+ IPS edge to edge notched display the body remains slim and light to handle. N12 display is decent as the colours are not sharp nor vibrant, though it does get too bright for a phone priced under 10K.
Performance
Micromax N12 is powered by a MediaTek Helio P22 SoC coupled with 3 gigs of RAM with 32GB of onboard storage. The performance was solid owing to the stock Android 8.1 Oreo right out the box. Micromax fills the device with a lot of bloatware which is quite unnecessary.
The day to day use age was satisfactory, casual games ran smooth, multitasking was easy with less of jibber jabber. The fingerprint sensor and Face unlock were fast, accurate 9 out of 10 times.
Camera
The Micromax Infinity N12 sports a dual camera setup with a 13MP + 5MP sensor on the back and a 16MP snapper up front. Flash on the front of the device facilitates for good selfies. The image quality was decent with adequate brightness and sharpness level. AI mode failed to help the image quality in any way. The device took way too long to process the images in AI mode. Low light shots suffered a lot of noise and grain. Bokeh mode added the required depth effect to the subject images which was good.
In all the images were acceptable at best with moderate saturation level and colour contrast. The camera isn’t the strongest suit of the Infinity N12.
Battery
Infinity N12 packs a 4000mAh battery pack which helps it get through a day`s worth of use age with plenty of juice left. N12 doesn’t support fast charging, thus takes more than 2 hours to charge up to 100 per cent.
Gizmo Verdict
With a price tag of Rs.9999, the Infinity N12 fairs well in all department and gets the job done. If you seek a device that looks good, performs well and don’t want to break your bank doing it, N12 is a sweet choice for you.