Hands-on: #Gionee Elife S5.5, world's slimmest #phone

Gionee has finally launched Elife S5.5 smartphone in the Indian market. It is the slimmest phone available in the market at just 5.55mm thickness.

The phone also boasts of high-end hardware and comes with an octa-core processor. Originally unveiled at the Mobile World Congress, the phone will be available for purchase starting April 27.



We got a chance to spend some time with the phone and here is what we think about it:

Gionee Elife S5.5 sports a metallic frame, while the rest of the body is made of Corning Gorilla Glass. The combination of these materials gives the phone a premium feel, but also makes it a little fragile, mainly because of the glass back.

The phone is super slim and we were awestruck by the fact that Gionee managed to squeeze in so much into its sleek body. Yet, it feels solidly built thanks to the metal frame. It is also lightweight and easy to use with one hand, even though it features a 5-inch display.



Elife S5.5 will be available in black, white, blue, pink, and purple colour variants and we were impressed with the black and white models.

The front of the phone features a Super AMOLED screen, with the three capacitive navigation keys placed just below it, and the 5MP front camera with ultra-wide angle lens positioned above it, along with the sensor array.

The full HD display of the phone is very bright and offers vivid colours, sharp text and rich graphics. We felt that colours were a bit oversaturated, but that may be because of the AMOLED screen.

The left edge of the phone features the Power button and the Volume Rocker key, while the right edge sports the sim card tray. While the black and white variants of the phone do not disappoint when it comes to the fit and finish, the blue variant that we tried did not have the same level of refinement and we could see some rough edges.



The bottom edge of the phone features the 3.5mm headset jack while the microUSB port sits at the top edge.

The back panel features Gionee branding and a speaker outlet, in addition to the 13MP rear camera and LED flash located at the top left corner. The two stick out a bit, but don't increase the thickness of the phone.

The placement of the rear camera is a bit odd as the user's finger is likely to partially cover the lens while taking pictures in landscape mode.

We tried clicking a few pictures and found that the phone's front camera as well as the rear one take good quality pictures even indoors with artificial lighting.

The phone is certainly not slim on features and comes with high-end hardware under the hood. Powered by a 1.7GHz octa-core MediaTek chip and 2GB RAM, Gionee Elife S5.5 comes with 16GB internal storage. The phone comes with Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean) with Gionee's Amgo 2.0 UI running on top.

It is disappointing that it doesn't come with the latest version of Android and the quirks that we found in the Elife E7, including the overload of transition effects and lack of support for widgets, are still there.



That said, we did not encounter any lag while launching and using apps, and clicking photos in the brief time that we spent with the phone. We'll need to play some games and use the phone for a longer period to comment on its overall performance.

The phone comes with a 2,300mAh battery and Gionee has said that it will increase the capacity to 2,450mAh after a software update. Again, it's impressive how Gionee has fitted a high capacity battery in a super slim form factor.

We'll have a detailed review soon with an emphasis on all aspects of the phone, including its battery backup.

(The correspondent has travelled to Goa on the invitation of Gionee)

#Gionee Elife E7 review: Premium experience, mid-range price

Chinese device maker Gionee recently launched its latest flagship smartphone, the Gionee Elife E7, in the Indian market. Unlike its previous launches, Elife E7 is a premium smartphone and the first one to be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. The hardware specifications of the phone match some high-end phones available in the market even though the pricing is comparatively much lower. Is the Gionee Elife E7 the most economical premium Android phone available in the market? We try to find out.

Build
At first glance, Gionee Elife E7 looks like a taller version of the Elife E6. However, on closer inspection, you'll notice that it looks more rectangular, largely due to the lack of rounded corners. The phone's top and bottom edges, however, are rounded, just like the ones seen in Huawei Ascend P6.

The phone is made of good quality plastic, but sports a glossy finish curved back that makes it prone to smudges, particularly in black. It is available in 7 colours. The front of the phone is dominated by 5.5-inch Full-HD (JDI) display.
The three capacitive physical buttons for Menu, Home and Back are placed just below the display. The 8MP front-facing camera lens is located above the display, along with the sensor array. There's no branding on the front.



The left edge of the phone features a sim card tray, while the volume rocker key sits alone at the right edge. The power key and the 3.5mm headset jack are placed at the top edge, while the micro USB port is at the bottom. We wish Gionee had put the Power key at the right or left edge, as its present location makes it cumbersome to use. The keys are made of plastic and offer above average tactile feedback.

Gionee Elife E7 doesn't have a removable back. The large camera lens (housing a 16MP sensor) is placed at the top, similar to the Nokia Lumia 1520, along with a small LED flash. There's Gionee branding towards the lower part of the back. The phone feels good to hold, despite the glossy back.

Display
Gionee Elife E7 sports a 5.5-inch Full-HD (JDI) display that sports a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and pixel density of 401ppi. It also features Gorilla Glass 3 for added protection. We found the display to be adequately bright, with images and text appearing sharp and crisp and blacks looking deep. There's minimal bezel at the left and right side of the display panel, giving the phone an edgy look.

Software
Gionee Elife E7 runs a heavily customised build of Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, called Amigo 2.0, which is the second iteration of its user interface (UI) skin. The skin is similar to Xiaomi's MiUi ROM and doesn't feature a separate app launcher. Instead, the app icons are merged with the home screen, similar to the iPhone.

Even the multitasking menu of the phone is similar to the card-based multitasking menu introduced first in webOS and now in Apple's iOS 7. We feel that Gionee has gone overboard on transition effects and animations and navigating through the home screens and launching apps takes more time due to these extra bells and whistles. Perhaps, the software is not optimized to leverage the high-end hardware the phone features under the hood. The flying windows and transitions look anything but jarring. Also, the colourful, flat icons look like they've been borrowed from a kid's picture book.

Another problem is the absence of widgets. A number of Android users love widgets as they offer information at a glance, but Gionee Elife E7's UI doesn't support them. Even lock screen widgets are not supported barring one made by Gionee that offers access to camera, voice recorder, flashlight and a fake call app.

Gionee Elife E7 includes some third party apps, including UC Browser, which is the phone's default web browser, File Explorer, Facebook, Twitter, NQ Mobile Security, WhatsApp, BBM, Saavn music app, Yahoo Cricket, GameZone (a store to download new games), WeChat, Notes, App Manager, a torch and a compass app, Kingsoft Office, a weather app and the GioneeXender app(for transferring content).

It also includes apps for power management, Phone Accelerator for cleaning the cache and closing background processes and Traffic Assistant for tracking data usage.

Native apps on Elife E7 also offer extra functionality which we found to be pretty useful. For instance, you can put a sleep timer while using the Music app so that the phone locks automatically if you fall asleep while listening to music. You can also record phone calls, an in-built feature which most high-end Android phones don't offer (there are third party apps though). The video player can also be resized and can float on the screen while you can use other apps.



The Elife E7 also offers 'smart gestures' including smart dial ( to directly dial a number displayed in a message, contact details page or call history when the phone is brought close to the ear), smart answer (answer the phone when it's brought close to the ear), and pause alarm (when the phone is flipped).

It also includes 'Double click wake' which is essentially Gionee's version of double tap to wake up the phone when it's in sleep mode. The 'Quick Operating' mode allows you to unlock the phone and directly launch a particular app by drawing a pre-set pattern on the screen. We were able to use these gestures without encountering any issues.

The software is feature rich but we wish Gionee updates it to run more smoothly.

Camera
Gionee Elife E7 sports a 16MP rear camera with 1/1.23-inch sensor and 1.34m pixel size and an 8MP front-facing camera with 1.4m pixel size, the same as the iPhone 5's primary camera. According to Gionee, the camera lens was developed and customized based on Largan M8 lens solution. It claims that the rear camera lens is the most sensitive among all phone cameras.



Gionee has included two custom camera apps, Camera and CharmCam. The Camera app is the primary app that lets you switch between a simple mode and a professional mode. The professional mode features settings for Picture Size, Exposure value, White Balance and ISO, in addition to toggles for self-timer, HDR, Panorama, Face detection, and scene selection that are also included in the simple mode. An interesting inclusion is a level meter that helps in avoiding tilted captures. It also allows you to take burst shots.

The other app, CharmCam, features live filters to apply effects, and features various shooting modes, including Face beauty, an Eraser mode for removing objects from photos and even a PPT mode for capturing slideshows, among others.

The quality of daylight images captured outdoors was good with high level of detail, accurate colour reproduction, little or no noise and good contrast. Low-light and indoor shots also came out well, though these had some noise, especially under 100% zoom.



The phone offers video recording in 1080p, 720p and 480p resolution and includes a nifty anti-shake feature. The phone does not include Optical Image Stabilization though. It takes good quality video and thanks to the three microphones, the quality of audio is also good.

Performance
Gionee Elife E7 comes with really powerful hardware under the hood. Powered by a 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor coupled with Adreno 330 graphics and 2GB RAM (The 32GB storage variant of the phone has 3GB RAM), the phone offers great performance with the only issue being the laggy software. Hope Gionee can do something about it.

We were able to play games like Temple Run 2, Dead Trigger 2 and Asphalt 8 (with Visual Quality set to High and Engine at 100%) without encountering frame drops or freezes.

In synthetic benchmarks, the phone scored 34,622 in Antutu, 21,313 in Quadrant and 63 in Nenamark 2 benchmark tests. Some of these scores are much better than the Nexus 5, which is one of its main rivals.

Out of the 16GB storage, 8.98GB is available to the user. Unfortunately, you can't expand the storage as the phone doesn't come with a memory card slot which is such a pity.

Gionee Elife E7 offers Bluetooth, NFC, Wi-Fi and GPS connectivity options. It offers good call quality and signal reception and we did not encounter issues while making calls even in areas where cell signal is relatively weaker. The phone was able to lock to GPS without any hiccups.

Interestingly, it offers FM radio with recording capability. We were able to play most popular video and audio file formats.

The external speaker outlets on the phone, located at the bottom edge, offer loud sound output without distortion. We also liked the placement of the speaker outlets . Gionee has also integrated DTS technology for enhanced sound output.



One of the highlight features of Elife E7 is its battery backup. The phone is backed by a 2,500mAh battery (non-removable) and will last you a little more than a day even if you put the screen brightness at the highest level and use 3G data all the time. You'll be able to make about 2-3 hours of phone calls, play some casual games and browse the web in this time period. The phone can play video continuously for 8 to 9 hours.

Overall, the Elife E7 offers impressive performance and a great battery backup.

Verdict
So should you buy the Gionee Elife E7? If you're in the market for a premium Android phone and don't want to burn a hole in your pocket, Elife E7 is one of the most deserving contenders out there. The 16GB version of the phone is priced at Rs 26,999, while the 32GB version is priced at Rs 29,999.

However, in the same price range, you can also get the much-acclaimed Nexus 5, Google's own flagship phone made in collaboration with LG. Though Nexus 5 has an inferior camera and worse battery backup, but it offers a cleaner, smoother user interface and the promise of future Android updates. It would surely be one of the first few devices to get an update when a new version of Android is released. Another important factor to consider is the after sales service. Gionee is comparatively new to India and is still in the process of consolidating its presence in the market.

Gionee Elife E7 is just one step short of being a complete package. The phone packs in high-end hardware in an attractive form factor and offers a great battery backup. The only department it lags in is software.

Ref - TOI

#Micromax Canvas Turbo vs #Gionee Elife E6: Camera shootout

We put two 13-megapixel cameras to the test. Which one will reign?

We’ve seen a face-off between the Turbo and the Elife E6 in our specifications comparison and now it’s time to take a look at how well their cameras perform. Both phones have a 13MP BSI sensor around the back so it’s an even playing field. The real challenge will be in the post-processing. We’ve already reviewed the Gionee Elife E6 and liked how blazing fast the auto-focus was. The Turbo on the other hand lacks these lightning reflexes and takes its time focusing, which could limit the type of shots you can take. So without further ado, here’s our preliminary comparison between the two cameras under varied lighting conditions.  All comparison shots are 100 percent crops of the original image unless stated otherwise. Macro test 1 Full image 100 percent crop Both phones manage good macros here under bright sunlight. The Gionee tends to have a sharper focus and picks up slightly more detail as compared to the Turbo. That had a tough time focusing on the lock, but in the end, managed it pretty well.  Landscape Full image 100 percent crop Here, we test to see how well the cameras are able to handle detail in the horizon. Both phones do an average job here but the Gionee has more natural, warmer tones as compared to the Turbo.  Macro test 2 Full image 100 percent crop We once again had a tough time getting the camera to focus on the Turbo but in the end, the E6 inches ahead with slightly better colours and detail.

#Gionee Elife E6 review

 It hasn't been long since Chinese device maker Gionee set foot in the Indian market, and the company seems to have generated some buzz in this period, taking on Indian device makers like Micromax, Karbonn and Xolo with its budget smartphones, offering decent hardware specifications at an economy price.

The Gionee Elife E6 is the company's latest flagship phone. The phone got our attention with its sleek unibody form factor and clean lines, not usually seen in mid-range smartphones. 

The Elife E6 boasts of a full-HD screen, which is one of its major USPs, with only a handful of phones in the same price range that offer a 1080p display.

Is the Gionee Elife E6 the best Android smartphone in its class? We find out in our detailed re review.

Build / Design
The Gionee Elife E6 features a premium unibody design with a polycarbonate build that can be compared to the likes of the Nokia Lumia phones. It also borrows some elements from the iPhone 5's design, with a similar rectangular slab and rounded corners form factor. Even the positioning of the camera lens, the speaker grill and the Micro-USB port is similar to that of the iPhone 5 / 5s (the iPhone has a lightning connector port at the same place, though). 

 We had a White colour variant of the Gionee Elife E6 as our review unit, although the phone also comes in a Black colour variant.  The phone's body (excluding the front) sports a glossy, enamel like finish and can be slippery at times, owing to the phone's large form factor. 

The front of the Elife E6 features a 5-inch IPS Full-HD display, with the sensor array, a 5-megapixel front-facing camera lens and a notification LED are located above it. The three capacitive touch buttons, namely the Menu, Home and Back key, are located below the display.

The side edges of the Gionee Elife E6 are not rounded, and are relatively sharp. The volume rocker key is located at the right edge, while the micro-SIM tray is located at the left edge. The power / screen lock key sits at the top, with the 3.5mm headset jack and the Micro-USB port is placed at the bottom edge with the two speaker grills. The hardware buttons are metallic, and offer decent tactile feedback.

The back of the phone sports minimal branding towards the bottom, with the 13-megapixel camera lens and LED flash located toward the top left corner. The glossy finish of the back makes the Gionee Elife E6 prone to smudges.

The phone is not very bulky and fits easily into your pocket. Overall, the Gionee Elife E6 is a looker, and except for the glossy finish that makes it a bit slippery and prone to smudges, we don't have any qualms with it in this department.

Display
The Gionee Elife E6 features a 5-inch full-HD (1080x1920 pixels resolution) IPS screen based on One Glass Solution (OGS) technology with a Gorilla Glass 3 layer for protection. The screen is bright and vibrant, with text and images looking extremely crisp and sharp. However, colours appeared to be oversaturated, almost at AMOLED levels. 

Sunlight legibility was decent, and viewing angles were excellent thanks to the IPS panel. Overall, the Gionee Elife E6 has one of the best displays in its class only marred by its inaccurate colour rendering.

Software / User Interface
The Gionee Elife E6 runs a highly-tweaked version of Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean. The handset maker has put a custom 'Amigo' skin on top of the UI, and offers themes that let the user customise the phone's home screen and app icons.

In fact, if you remove the Google services and the Play store, and it would look like a different operating system, similar to Xiaomi's MiUi interface which is based on Android. The phone's OS doesn't offer the traditional Android home screen - app launcher structure, but instead, is a little similar to the iPhone's layout - the Elife E6's home screen is also the app launcher

For users who're switching to the Elife E6 from another Android phone, the arrangement would be a little unsettling but otherwise it might not be much of a problem.

Users can add up to nine home screens, which can be populated with app icons. The Gionee Elife E6 doesn't support widgets, though a weather and time widget stays on top of each of the phone's home-screen. It's also displayed on the lock screen, in addition to another lock-screen widget that offers shortcuts to the camera, torch and sound recorder apps.  

The notification tray on the Elife E6 features a settings shortcut and a clear all notifications button, along with expandable notifications (expanded with the two finger pull gesture). It features the same setting toggles shortcuts (plus a few extra) that are found in stock Android for quick access to airplane mode, battery status, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, data connection, data usage, audio profiles, brightness, screen backlight timeout, auto rotation, power saving mode and alarm clock. 

The option to wirelessly mirror the Elife E6's display with an HDMI-enabled device through a wireless display adapter is also present. This is essentially an Android 4.2 feature.

There's a dock at the bottom if the Gionee Elife E6's interface, where four preferred app shortcuts can be placed. This dock is static across all the home screens. Each home screen can have 12 app icons in addition to the dock.

The lock screen mechanism is also a little different on the Gionee Elife E6. You can either just press the power button to lock the screen or swipe towards the bottom of the screen from the weather+time widget. Swiping up unlocks the screen. 

The Gionee Elife E6's UI is full of transition animations and effects and you can even customise some of them. When you tap an app icon, the app pops up from the bottom of the screen. When you exit the app the app window retracts to the bottom again. These effects look gimmicky and jarring, and increase the launch time of apps.

The Gionee Elife E6's UI borrows its app switcher from Apple's iOS 7 card-based multitasking menu, which was first seen in webOS and later in BlackBerry PlayBook OS. The implementation is almost the same with a full window preview of the running apps being displayed as soon as the Home button is pressed. You can dismiss apps by throwing their preview windows out of the screen and switch by swiping horizontally. 

We feel that pressing the home button on the Gionee Elife E6 should take users to the first home screen and not open the app switcher. At times, pressing the home button when you're in a system app (messaging, gallery) also opens the app switcher instead of taking you to the home screen/ launcher.

The three capacitive buttons, back, home and menu, help in navigating through the Gionee Elife E6, with the home button also doubling up as an app switcher/ task manager on long press. 

The settings menu of the Gionee Elife E6 offers popular settings under the 'common settings' tab and hides the complete set of settings under the 'all' tab. This makes things simple for new smartphone users but increases a step for people familiar with the default Android settings menu.

The phone also includes 'smart gestures' and 'air gestures'. The smart gestures include smart dial (dial a number displayed in a message, contact details page when you bring the phone close to your ear), smart answer (answer the phone automatically when you bring the phone close to your ear), and pause alarm (when you flip the phone). These worked as promise.

The Elife E6 also offers air gestures, as seen in phones like the Samsung Galaxy S4 and even in some economy phones such as the Lava Iris 504. The feature enables users to answer calls or browse pictures by just waving your hand. This didn't work for us at all. The only gesture that worked was the 'smart pause' control that pauses the video when you look away.

Gionee has also bundled some apps with the Elife E6, including UC Browser - the phone's default web browser, File Explorer, Facebook, Twitter, NQ Mobile Security, WhatsApp, Yahoo Cricket, GameZone - a games store to download new games, Fishing Joy game, WeChat, Notes, App Manager, a torch app (to use the LED flash as a flash light), a compass app, Kingsoft Office, a weather app, as well as the GioneeXender app - for transferring content, Du Battery Saver app, and Saavn - the Indian music streaming service.

Some of the native apps on the Elife E6 offer extended functionality. For instance, the Music app allows you to put a sleep timer, if you like falling asleep while listening to music. The phone dialler allows you to record voice calls. Most Android phones don't offer this feature though this functionality is offered by some third-party apps that have certain limitations and don't offer good quality recordings. The phone also allows you to set a sleep timer to turn the phone off/ on or in airplane mode.

Overall, the Elife E6's UI could do with some more finishing touches. We hope Gionee pushes an update to fix minor niggles.

Camera
The Gionee Elife E6 sports a 13-megapixel auto-focus camera with a Sony Exmor R sensor and five element lens. It also includes a second generation BSI sensor for low-light imaging.

The phone comes with a customised Camera app and allows you to capture photos in HDR and Panorama modes as well. It comes with the usual controls including settings for Exposure, Colour effect, White balance and ISO, among others. 

The Elife E6's camera also supports continuous shots, taking up to 99 shots in that mode, apart from supporting smile detection and face detection. It also comes with a 'Phone Booth' setting that lets you superimpose fancy picture frames with photos. In addition to this it also features colour effects or filters.

The camera of the Gionee Elife E6 takes good quality images in daylight and in sufficient artificial light. However, we observed that pictures taken in low-light conditions did not come out well.

Pictures taken indoors with less light were also grainy. Colour reproduction was pretty accurate and images sported good contrast, though it did miss out on detail at times.

The Elife E6 can record HD videos and we found that the quality of videos captured through the back camera was good. It also offers EIS or Electronic Image Stabilisation to minimise blurring caused by shaking of hands while shooting a video.

The 5-megapixel front camera also takes decent shots and is great for video calls. Overall, we feel that the Elife E6 can fill in for a point and shoot camera barring low-light conditions.

Performance
The Gionee Elife E6 is powered by a 1.5GHz Mediatek MT6589T quad-core processor. It has 2GB RAM, and a PowerVR SGX 544MP GPU. The phone offers 32GB of internal storage, which is non-expandable, and around 23GB of storage is available to the user. We wish the phone would have come with a microSD card slot keeping in consideration that some users like to store movies and music on their phones.

The overall experience of navigation through the Elife E6's interface was impressive, thanks to the phone's quad-core processor and sufficient memory, though the additional visual effects do make slow things down slightly. 

We did not experience any lag while launching apps, playing most games, scrolling web pages or switching between apps. Graphics intensive games however, like Asphalt 7: Heat, did slow down the Gionee Elife E6 substantially, with visibly dropped frame rates. 

We were able to play full-HD clips smoothly and the Elife E6 supported formats like .AVI and .MOV, natively. The speaker on the phone delivers decent quality sound at above good volume levels, and thanks to the location of the speaker grill, the sound doesn't get muffled when the phone lies on its back.

The headphones that come with the Gionee Elife E6 offer good quality sound output, and look good in white and silver colour. The phone also offers FM radio and recording. Call quality was good. The Elife E6 was also able to get a GPS lock easily while using the Maps app.

The Gionee Elife E6 comes with an 2,000mAh battery, and based on our experience, it will last you more than a full day with medium to heavy usage, including 1 to 1.5 hours of phone calls, two e-mail accounts with push notifications, screen at maximum brightness, playing some music and video clips, Twitter notifications and WhatsApp chats. 

It's also worth pointing out that we had majorly used mobile data, occasionally connecting to Wi-Fi and had turned off auto-brightness - instead, keeping it at full brightness. The phone was hooked to a 3G network for most of the time. Altering these settings might help in running the Elife E6 for a longer duration, depending on your usage pattern.

Gionee also offers a 'power saving' mode that limits processor utilization, and turns off data sync and various connectivity options when the phone's screen is locked for five minutes. You might be able to get some extra hours with this setting at the expense of the phone's functionality.

Verdict
Interestingly, Gionee takes on Indian brands like Micromax and Karbonn that also import Chinese devices and rebrand them. Of course, it still needs to make its presence felt in the market but in our use, we found the the Elife E6 to be much better than what Indian smartphone brands offer in terms of build and design, display and other features. 

It even challenges the A-list brands like Sony, Samsung and HTC, that don't really offer a viable option in the Rs. 20,000 to Rs. 25,000 price segment, unless you are ready to settle with older generation devices. Sony's Xperia C, HTC's Desire 500, Samsung's Galaxy Grand Quattro are the only devices from major manufacturers that offer quad-core smartphones in the same price segment, though none are clocked at 1.5GHz, feature 2GB of RAM, or a 5-inch FHD display.

The only issue we're concerned about is after sales service from Gionee. Although the company appears to have set up service centres at all major locations in India, one can't deny that it's a new player in a market. If you don't take these factors into consideration, the Gionee Elife E6 is definitely a good buy at a price of Rs. 22,999.

You can also look at the Lenovo K900 (also full-HD), Nexus 4 and Huawei Ascend Mate that also fall in the same price segment. If you're open to Windows Phone, then the Nokia Lumia 720 is also a good option, though it has a smaller screen.

Price: Rs. 22,999


Gionee Elife E6 in pictures 

Pros

• Sleek unibody design
• Excellent Full-HD display
• Good performance

Cons

• Back panel slippery, prone to smudges
• No expandable storage

Ratings (Out of 5)

Design: 3.5
Display: 4
Camera: 3.5
Performance: 4
Software: 4
Battery Life: 3.5
Value for Money: 4
Overall: 3.5