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After Micromax established its dominance in the budget smartphone market with the Canvas HD, it didn’t seem as though any other worthy competitors would emerge to take the market forward. Enter Gionee, a relatively unknown brand that created an impact solely based on offering excellent specifications for the same price as its competitors.Gionee was also working on offering better designs.
Manufacturers didn’t include scratch-resistant glass in their plastic builds, but here Gionee was with its metallic builds and Corning Gorilla Glass. The momentum of the company is as strong as ever with the recent Elife E7 challenging the Google Nexus 5 directly in terms of performance and value for money. This is despite the increasingly annoying Amigo UI that has been slapped on top of Android.
Where does that leave the Gionee Elife S5.5, a cheaper but still upper-tier device that boasts a 1920×1080 resolution display, octa-core CPU and Android 4.4.2 KitKat? With the Nexus 4 having been discontinued, there’s plenty of opportunity for a new mid-range smartphone to dominate.
There’s plenty of competition on offer including Samsung and Sony. We find out what the 5 best features of Gionee Elife S5.5 are that help it stand out from the crowd. Most mid-tier smartphones from budget manufacturers like Karbonn and Micromax tend to be a bit sturdier than usual. There’s still nothing that stands out about them but the Gionee Elife S5.5 is an exception.
The build quality is very strong thanks to a chassis that’s made of a magnesium alloy. And though there’s no Corning Gorilla Glass covering the front, Gionee did make sure to implement some scratch-resistant glass on both the front and back of the device. While there are concerns of fingerprints and dust, the glass panels make the device easier to hold and prevent stray scratches from denting the body. They also help give a more elegant feel to what is otherwise a very simplistic design.
Of course, the build quality of the Gionee Elife S5.5 is only half the story. Gionee has touted its newest pone as being one of the slimmest Android smartphones out there.
With a 5.5 mm thickness, which means it’s roughly 0.216 inches thick, the Elife S5.5 might in fact be the slimmest smartphone till date. It’s even slimmer than the Sony Xperia T3, which measures 7 mm (0.276 inches) thick.It’s incredibly light for its size as well, weighing 133 grams.
This is likely due to the magnesium alloy but remember that the Elife S5.5 has a 5 inch display and glass covering the front and back panels. A 2300 mAh battery also resides in the device which should make it heavier and harder to handle overall. Nonetheless, for a smartphone of its size, the Gionee Elife S5.5 is highly portable.
Gionee isn’t typically the company you look towards for stellar optical performance. None of their devices, especially the Elife E7’s 16 megapixel sensor, managed to make much of an impact.
The Gionee Elife S5.5 isn’t too big of an improvement in that regard. However, considering it’s a mid-tier smartphone, that it could successfully emulate the Elife E7’s performance isn’t a bad thing.
The Elife S5.5 features a 13 megapixel rear camera with support for LED flash and auto focus. It also includes a 5 megapixel front facing camera for video chats.
In terms of images, it’s competent at both low-light and day time shots. Indoor shots are also surprisingly good with almost unnoticeable noise.
The few criticisms that could be lodged at the camera are that it makes for a small bulge in the frame of the device – though it doesn’t really make much of a difference – and results in slight heating issues. It thankfully doesn’t affect battery life but beware of using the camera of extended periods of time.Fortunately, Gionee is reasonably good at displays and the full HD, AMOLED display on the Gionee Elife S5.5 is no exception. In terms of pixel density, this makes for 441 pixels per inch (ppi) resulting in a very sharp display.
The viewing angles and brightness are also seemingly on the dot and you won’t face any issues with glare.The choice of an AMOLED display is especially interesting considering controversies surrounding the saturation levels of the same. Samsung was often criticized for over-saturating the colours on its Super AMOLED screens until recently. The Gionee Elife S5.5 doesn’t face such issues as the colours have a healthy amount of saturation without going overboard.
Another cool use for an AMOLED screen is Active Display notifications. Similar to the Motorola Moto X, you can use apps like Dynamic Notifications which will light up select parts of your display to showcase notification icons.
This is especially useful for conserving battery life besides appearing cool.The merits of MediaTek’s True Octa-core products are still very much up for debate. Android is still in the midst of being properly optimized for quad-core CPUs, so octa-core chips that use all cores simultaneously are still a ways off. Nonetheless, you’ll still be assured of decent performance with the MediaTek MT6592.
The SoC in the Gionee Elife S5.5 is clocked at 1.7 GHz and also includes 2 GB of RAM to support it. This chip makes use of an eight core ARM Cortex A7 and a Mali-450MP4 clocked at 700 MHz. Graphical performance is decent in this regard, though the Mali GPU has a hard time really matching up to Adreno’s products. While performance is better than most other devices, the problem with a True Octa-core CPU lays in heating issues.
This many cores running at once is bound to heat your device up quick, which becomes an even bigger issue on a slim device like the Gionee Elife S5.5. Once again, it’s up to how often you use the device in a day and for what. Gaming and HD video recording sessions should be limited though.Saurav is Lead Android Developer at zopper and he also contributes to latest tech buzz news on zopper blog. He is tech savvy and internet geek who loves to surf internet 24*7. Connect with Saurav on on Google+