Build up
I was recently drooling over Gionee advent in the global smartphone space. It was then that this razor sharp device caught my fancy and I thought we should bring out the report on the Gionee Elife S5.5. At 5.5mm it’s currently the thinnest phone in the world. Gionee seems to be taking Micromax mobiles head-on with its ultra-affordable smartphones. It had a smashing success with its E Life E7 an extremely powerful machine priced modestly. Let’s have a look at the Worlds slimmest phone and see if slim is the in thing or the curves will be back!
Design and Construction
Gionee Elife S is 5.5 inch thick thin (Now that sounds better!). It seems like a piece of futuristic spacecraft tile that was machined to precision. The bezel is thin along with beveled edges on the periphery. Front and the rear have a glossy touch and the back panel is devoid of any protrusion or craters and is simply plain. The lens is at the left corner sitting inside a chrome plate along with the LED flash. The phone looks more like a bar of chocolate.
Screening it
Gionee is slim but that doesn’t restrict it from having a huge 5.5 inch screen tuned to display at an resolution of 1082 x 1920 pixels resolving into an outstanding pixel density of 440ppi. Viewing angles are great although the brightness of the screen decreases relatively at some awkward angle. Screen has a fluidic layer to this and it actually feels good to operate. The capacitive touch buttons are responsive.
Powerhouse
The Octa-Core processor is clocked at a good 1.7GHz and coupled with 2GB of RAM to provide oodles of boost needed during extreme multitasking and gaming sessions. The UI flow is pretty fluid even after the Amigo overlay eating up the major chunk of processing power. Games run as smooth as a car on ice with no choppy graphics and evident framedrops.
The Eyes
If you’re wondering how many pixels lie under the lens then here you have it- 13 Megapixel and another 5MP as the secondary camera (Sounds a tad too generous isn’t it?) Auto focus is mighty fast. The camera app is intuitive with the usual set of options like the exposure, ISO, scenes, picture size and it has an added feature called the video stabilization mode which cancels the jerks during video recording. HDR mode has a good dynamic range and the luminosity is spread evenly feeling real and unprocessed. The rear camera is something you can gasp about it is a 5MP fixed focus camera will be the perfect choice for selfies and video chats.
Backing it up
As expected S5.5 being the slimmest design doesn’t have a battery door and employs the unibody construction. The 2300mAh battery has enough grunts to power the device for a minimum of one complete day. If you don’t run heavy applications and do lots of multitasking then there is an option to tame the CPU by throttling it down, a very clever bit by Gionee.
Verdict
Gionee seems to have the wheel rolling in India with quite intense marketing campaign it has registered a tiny space in the Indian consumers mind. Time has come that they leverage the same and start concentrating on the mid segment smartphone and extending the sales channel. The slimmest phone has all the things one could probable fit into a 5.5mm phone. The accessory list includes a premium pouch and an OTG cable (Yes ELife 5.5 supports OTG). The only niggle with this phone is it slightly overheats if made to run games for a prolonged time. I would definitely not shy away from recommending this machine over the usual bunch of Samsung’s and Nokias.
Author Bio
Mahit Huilgol is a Mechanical engineering graduate and a gadget and technology aficionado. Gadgets and Automobiles are the two things in the world that fuels his passion. Until recently, he worked with an MNC as an analyst and now he is part of the content team at findYogi.com – a buying decision platform for consumers.