If the ancient 3310 can come back from the dead[1], why not other phones? Micromax[2] seems to have caught the nostalgia bug and has decided to resuscitate the Canvas 2[3] – in name at least because there’s absolutely nothing that this new phone carries forward from its namesake. We don’t know why Micromax went straight to Canvas 2 instead of just rebooting the line and starting with “Canvas” - the 2012 model[4] might have been popular but it certainly wasn’t iconic. Budget phones at the time weren’t built to last very long, and we doubt many people would even be able to pick it out of a lineup of low-cost phones from that era.
Still, maybe there are pockets of buyers who remember this model fondly, and so we have the new, improved Micromax Canvas 2 (2017)[5]. A lot has changed in the four-and-a-half years since the original was launched[6], most notably the rise of Chinese companies in the budget segment and the resulting decline[7] or even disappearance of several Indian brands. Just for fun, here’s a quick look at the features and specifications that got people excited in 2012[8]: the Micromax Canvas 2 (A110) was a “big” phone with a 5-inch 480x854-pixel, 262K colour screen, a dual-core MediaTek MT6577 processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, and a 2000mAh battery. It had an 8-megapixel rear camera, a 0.3-megapixel front camera, and ran Android 4.0. Of course, its best feature was its price: just under Rs. 10,000.
Times have certainly changed. Micromax will need to do a lot better if it wants to impress buyers in 2017, even in the value segment....