First look at Micromax Canvas Sliver 5: Good looking and slim, but bloated pricing

Micromax announced its latest premium handset in the Canvas series - the Canvas Sliver 5 - which boasts of the ‘world’s slimmest phone’ tag. Micromax Informatics CEO Vineet Taneja spent a lot of his presentation time talking about the build and design aspects of the phone and how Micromax arrived at making a metal frame phone that is not just slim but also light. But the price announcement was an altogether different matter. We will talk about the price soon, but first let’s take a look at the build quality more closely. Build quality and design The Canvas Sliver 5 is the slimmest phone ever according to Micromax. At a mere 5.1 mm thickness, excluding any camera bumps on the rear side, the Sliver 5 sure is a head turner. This is definitely the USP of the phone. Also apart from being a slim phone, it’s also light at just 97 grams. The metallic frame with the double layer of bright aluminium coating, adds a touch of class to this slim phone. [caption id=“attachment_271267” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] Did someone say light? Yes, lighter than an apple.[/caption]   The volume rocker buttons located on the left hand side and the power standby button on the right hand side, both have metallic build and a good feedback. The top of the phone is clean whereas the base has the 3.5 mm audio jack and Micro USB charging port. The rear side is made of glossy plastic and on the front you have a 4.8inch AMOLED display. The bezels are quite thick on the top and bottom. Display The Micromax Canvas Sliver 5 comes with a 4.8inch HD AMOLED display. There is a touch layer merged with the AMOLED display. The colours look vibrant and viewing angles are good. But the Corning gorilla glass 3 has a propensity to collect smudges. When the phone is in sleep mode, the display is flush with the bezel of the black coloured model. Chipset, RAM The phone comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 Chipset which has a 1.2GHz quad core processor. This is paired with 2GB RAM. On the storage front the phone offers 16GB out of which only 11.4GB is available to the user. There is no provision to add in a micro SD card. OS, Connectivity The Micromax Canvas Sliver 5 comes with an Android 5.0.2 Lollipop interface with no custom skin, which is a good thing. But there are some pre loaded apps such as Apps center, Chaatz, Clean Master, Hotstar, Quikr, Snapdragon and so on. But these can be uninstalled if you so wish. The phone comes with single SIM 4G LTE connectivity. It takes in a NanoSIM card. Apart from this you have WiFi 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS Camera Micromax Canvas Sliver 5 comes with an 8MP rear camera with a Sony IMX219 stacked CMOS sensor. according to Micromax, this helps in preserving battery life. It comes with a dedicated Professional mode which let’s you shoot continuous shots, change ISO, adjust white balance and more. On the front there is a 5MP camera which also has access to the professional mode features. The lighting conditions at the demo stations weren’t ideal to really test out the camera. So you’ll have to wait for sample shots. Battery The Sliver 5 comes with a 2000mAh lithium polymer battery which according to Micromax offers a 1 day battery life on regular use case. According to Micromax, the use of AMOLED display, stacked sensor camera, helps reduce power consumption. We will have to test this claim. Conclusion The Micromax Canvas Sliver 5 sure looks great with the slim form factor and the light weight is an added plus despite the metal frame. The price point of Rs 17,999 is where it will face a challenge because of the low power chipset which you generally see in sub Rs 10,000 phones. Of course build quality is better and you have a seemingly decent camera, but considering you are getting much higher specced phones at a lesser price point these days, the path ahead for the Sliver 5 is crowded with more powerful handsets. We will have to give a final verdict on performance and battery life only after doing a complete review of the phone. Till then, do visit our **image gallery for a closer look at the device** .