Gionee Elife S6 pro review
Gionee, once a third party smartphone market working for other company's like HTC, layer started making their own Elife smartphone series. They were well known got their ultra slim Elfie S5.1, now they're back with another. This is the review of Gionee Elfie S6 pro.
Design: "Shine with metal", that's the company's hashtag for the Elife S6 and S6 pro. Anybody would bet that the phone's build quality must be praiseworthy. And it is! The phone's body very well though out and though out looks plain in mere sight, it gives very comfortable and ergonomic feel in the hand. It's 7.6mm at thickness and weighs a hefty 170gms. There are no sharp edges or clear cut corners. Everything is chamfered and looks very cleanly finished overall. Great job, once again Gionee.
Display: This S6 pro has a 5.5' 1080p IPS LCD panel with 401ppi. Being an IPS panel, viewing angles are very good and color accuracy is quite satisfying as well. My only gripe with the goodish is the brightness. Though it is very bright for moderate lighting, it's not bright enough for outdoors, and screen is quite reflective too. It's better to put on an oleophobic or a matte finished screen protector on it.
Performance: Gionee has gone with the MTK approach for their flagship and have used a Mediatek Helio P10 true octacore processor clocked at 1.8GHz and a Mali MP-T860 MP2 GPU with 4GB of DDR4 RAM. Built on storage is an impressive 64GB and expandable to another 128GB via microSD card. It has a home button on the front and a fingerprint sensor on the rear, which works exceptionally well. It can recognise your finger pretty much every single time and unlocks your phone immediately. It's also mirror finished, to resist smudges and moisture.
The phone runs on Gionee's own UI called amigo UI on top of Android 6.0 marshmallow. The UI is a traditional chinese one which lacks an app drawer, but has a lot of cool and custom tricks built into it. Like built on parallel space like feature that allows 2 WhatsApp accounts for 2 Sims on your phone, and a feature called live lock; something similar to Google's smart lock. But the UI has occasional stutters. While doing simple things like seeing a live wallpaper! It appears that the Amigo UI 3.2 is still under construction at some portions. Hopefully the stutters and jitters will go away after a simple software OTA update. We'll have to wait and see.
Camera: The S6 pro has a 13mp rear camera with f/2.0 aperture and PDAF(phase detection auto focus) and the front camera is an 8mp sensor with the same aperture. Cameras are great and take hood quality photos. But there is no 4K video support because of the chipset limitations. The 1080p video capturing at 30fps sometimes struggles with proper exposure as you move the phone around. Selfies however, are great. The camera's lens is pretty wide angled and pictures come out to be vivid and detailed. The front camera can also record 720p videos, but has the same shortcoming with exposure😒.
Battery: The phone packs a 3130mAh non removable battery with USB type C charging port. What's unique is that the charger attaches itself magnetically to the charging port. So you can just pull your phone away while it's connected to the charger and the weak magnets will smoothly detach the cord from the phone! No more pulling the whole wire out when you pick up your phone while charging. Battery backup of quote good and the power facing chipset ensures about 4 hours of continuous usage. There isn't any particular fast charging technology though.
Price: The phone retails for a fairly acceptable price of 20,000 INR. A gorgeous looking phone with good specs and a convenient charging mechanism. Looks like a worthy contender for that price segment in the market👍.
Design: "Shine with metal", that's the company's hashtag for the Elife S6 and S6 pro. Anybody would bet that the phone's build quality must be praiseworthy. And it is! The phone's body very well though out and though out looks plain in mere sight, it gives very comfortable and ergonomic feel in the hand. It's 7.6mm at thickness and weighs a hefty 170gms. There are no sharp edges or clear cut corners. Everything is chamfered and looks very cleanly finished overall. Great job, once again Gionee.
Display: This S6 pro has a 5.5' 1080p IPS LCD panel with 401ppi. Being an IPS panel, viewing angles are very good and color accuracy is quite satisfying as well. My only gripe with the goodish is the brightness. Though it is very bright for moderate lighting, it's not bright enough for outdoors, and screen is quite reflective too. It's better to put on an oleophobic or a matte finished screen protector on it.
Performance: Gionee has gone with the MTK approach for their flagship and have used a Mediatek Helio P10 true octacore processor clocked at 1.8GHz and a Mali MP-T860 MP2 GPU with 4GB of DDR4 RAM. Built on storage is an impressive 64GB and expandable to another 128GB via microSD card. It has a home button on the front and a fingerprint sensor on the rear, which works exceptionally well. It can recognise your finger pretty much every single time and unlocks your phone immediately. It's also mirror finished, to resist smudges and moisture.
The phone runs on Gionee's own UI called amigo UI on top of Android 6.0 marshmallow. The UI is a traditional chinese one which lacks an app drawer, but has a lot of cool and custom tricks built into it. Like built on parallel space like feature that allows 2 WhatsApp accounts for 2 Sims on your phone, and a feature called live lock; something similar to Google's smart lock. But the UI has occasional stutters. While doing simple things like seeing a live wallpaper! It appears that the Amigo UI 3.2 is still under construction at some portions. Hopefully the stutters and jitters will go away after a simple software OTA update. We'll have to wait and see.
Camera: The S6 pro has a 13mp rear camera with f/2.0 aperture and PDAF(phase detection auto focus) and the front camera is an 8mp sensor with the same aperture. Cameras are great and take hood quality photos. But there is no 4K video support because of the chipset limitations. The 1080p video capturing at 30fps sometimes struggles with proper exposure as you move the phone around. Selfies however, are great. The camera's lens is pretty wide angled and pictures come out to be vivid and detailed. The front camera can also record 720p videos, but has the same shortcoming with exposure😒.
Battery: The phone packs a 3130mAh non removable battery with USB type C charging port. What's unique is that the charger attaches itself magnetically to the charging port. So you can just pull your phone away while it's connected to the charger and the weak magnets will smoothly detach the cord from the phone! No more pulling the whole wire out when you pick up your phone while charging. Battery backup of quote good and the power facing chipset ensures about 4 hours of continuous usage. There isn't any particular fast charging technology though.
Price: The phone retails for a fairly acceptable price of 20,000 INR. A gorgeous looking phone with good specs and a convenient charging mechanism. Looks like a worthy contender for that price segment in the market👍.