Spice has announced a 5 inch Android phone in the market, called Smart Flo Pace 2 Mi502, for just Rs 6,999. The phone is pitched directly against Micromax Canvas Viva A72, a 5 inch device, which retails in the market at around Rs 6,350.
Both devices fall in the low cost 5 inch phablet category, yet they are uniquely different from each other. So if you had to buy one of these two which one should you buy? Let’s find out.
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Look and feel
Both the Spice Smart Flo Pace 2 and Micromax Canvas Viva come with a 480 x 800 pixel TFT LCD display. The difference is that Spice is 9.6 mm thick as compared to Canvas Viva’s 10.6 mm thickness.
On the colour front Spice Pace 2 is available in white and blue color options while the Canvas Viva comes only in black.
Design wise both the Spice Smart Flo Pace 2 and Micromax Canvas Viva have adopted the same old but very popular design form, which carries on from devices under both the brands. The Spice Smart Flo Pace 2 gets a metallic side trimming adding a touch of look to the device, which looks good on the blue variant; while the Micromax Canvas Viva also features a similar look and side trimming, but only a black variant is available, which too looks really good.
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Hardware
Both the smartphones features a 5 inch touchscreen display. This LCD display supports multi-touch sensitivity and 480 x 800 pixel resolution natively.
Spice Smart Flo Pace 2 houses a dual core 1 GHz processor, which is the first ever of its class for mobile devices, coupled with 512 MB RAM. On the other hand the Micromax Canvas Viva features a single core processor clocked at 1 GHz and coupled with 256 MB RAM.
Spice Pace 2 offers 512 MB of on board storage and a memory card slot capable of holding up to a 32 GB memory card. Compared to that Micromax Canvas Viva only offers 110 MB storage and a memory card slot capable of holding up to a 32 GB memory card.
Both smartphones support 2G networks to deliver data connectivity. Both offer WiFi at 2.4 GHz. Both offer Bluetooth 4.0, but only Spice Pace 2 offers Bluetooth 4.0, which brings better battery savings as well.
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Camera
Both Spice Smart Flo Pace 2 and Micromax Canvas Viva have adopted similar imaging hardware. Micromax Canvas Viva offers a 3 megapixel camera at the back without flash and a VGA camera in the front, while Spice Pace 2 goes beyond a 3 megapixel camera with a 5 megapixel rear camera with dual LED flash and also a VGA camera in the front.
Operating system
Spice Smart Flo Pace 2 gets the newer Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, while Micromax A72 features Android 2.3 Gingerbread. It means that Smart Flo Pace 2 is ahead in this area, and will benefit in terms of better performance, better application support and software optimization. While on the other hand the Micromax Canvas Viva will only get support for a few features and even though most applications will be supported on Gingerbread it will soon get outdated.
However Spice is ahead, it still is surprising that with such hardware specifications the company has not chosen Jelly Bean 4.2 operating system.
Battery
In terms of battery we would not say that the Spice Smart Flo Pace 2 and Micromax Canvas Viva are surprisingly different, but yes there is a difference of about 100 mAh in terms of battery storage capacity.
The Spice Smart Flo Pace 2 gets a 2100 mAh battery pack while the Micromax Canvas Viva gets a 2000 mAh battery pack. There won’t be an exceptional difference in the operating times but yes with different versions of Android the difference could increase.
Finally
The Spice Smart Flo Pace 2 is clearly better than the Canvas Viva in every sense but the Canvas Viva gets more fan following and a sweeter price point as well. There is no denying the fact, though, that the Spice Smart Flo Pace 2 will make for a better low cost smartphone and will offer much better performance as compared to the Canvas Viva.
Ultimately, how well Spice has optimized the device for performance is still to be seen and we will soon know as the device starts getting to users and to us as well for a review.
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