Gionee Elife S7 First Impressions

It’s the time of the year when Gionee launches a new smartphone and this time it’s Elife S7. Announced at MWC this year, the Gionee Elife S7 launched in India on April 4, 2015 at an event in Hyderabad. Last year, Gionee had announced the Elife S5.5 which was the slimmest smartphone by that time until Oppo R5 and Vivo X5Max weren’t announced. Though it looks like Gionee is not running for the slimmest smartphone this time but instead for a style quotient with power.

The details are already out from the announcement at MWC in Barcelona but we shall recap them in short. Gionee Elife S7 sports a 5.2-inch full HD 1080p Super AMOLED display. The S7 is powered by a MediaTek MT6752 chipset with Octa-core 1.7GHz processor paired with 2GB of RAM. It comes with 16GB of on-board storage with no expandable option. As always, Gionee has made a camera experience which totally needs to be appreciated. The Elife S7 features a 13MP rear camera and a 8MP front-facing camera. It is powered by a 2700mAh battery and runs on Amigo 3.0 based on Android Lollipop 5.0.

Gionee smartphones have always been top-notch when it comes to design. Take it either, Gionee Elife E6, E7, S5.5 or S5.1 all of them had its own special something. Though the S-series i.e. Style Series are specifically aligned for that purpose, they tend to have better build quality and design and Elife S7 is no such exception. Gionee’s ‘U-Shaped’ smartphone with curved edges unlike squared ones on the Elife S5.5, gives the Elife S7 better ergonomics. The edges are made from aircraft grade aluminium to provide that solid foundation keeping it lightweighted. It is protected by Corning Goriila Glass on the top and bottom to make it scratch-free. The 5.2-inch AMOLED full HD display gives it a sharp output and along side that, Amigo 3.0 includes a dark theme to reduce its power consumption by almost 30 percent.

We couldn’t test the camera much and wouldn’t like to comment upon the same without testing its performance. One thing is for sure that Amigo is getting better, catching up with Android latest updates. This doesn’t mean that it is perfect now. It still has bugs which they are trying to improve hearing on the feedback from the active users on Gionee forums. In case you happen to use a Gionee smartphone and have a feature request or a bug to be reported, you can log on to GCafe where someone might help you.

Summarising our initial impressions, Gionee Elife S7 is the not the flagship smartphone to be compared with, because that’s what the iteration to E-Series i.e. E8 will be, coming up in June, 2015. The S7 is the next iteration in the S-Series integrating style with power unlike the Gionee S5.1 which was so beautiful but lacked in terms of performance. This smartphone packs a lot new features like the polar charging, Chamoeleon Launcher and the MediaTek chipset MT6752 itself. Gionee Elife S7 has been launched for the price of 24,999 and we shall be coming up with a full review soon which might help you choose this smartphone in case you plan to upgrade/buy a smartphone in the same price range in the near future.