Gionee Elife E7

Chinese handset maker Gionee has launched its new flagship phone, Gionee Elife E7, in the Indian market. The phone boasts of a full-HD screen and high-end hardware including a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor, in addition to a slim, attractive form factor. We got a chance to spend some time with the phone, here are our first impressions:

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, majorly 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 material, but sports a glossy finish that makes it prone to smudges.

The front of the phone is dominated by 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. There's minimal bezel at the left and right side of the display panel, giving the phone an edgy look.

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 phone's back is curved and sports a glossy finish that is prone to smudges. 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 was good to hold, despite the glossy back.

Gionee Elife E7 runs a heavily customised build of Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, called Amigo 2.0, which is second iteration of its 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. During our brief use of the phone, we didn't encounter any stutters or lag while launching apps or going back to the home screen, however, we still feel that Gionee has gone overboard on transition effects and animations.

Elife E7's USP is its high-end hardware that includes a 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor, 2GB RAM (3GB for the 32GB version) and Adreno 330 GPU, and a 16MP rear camera with 1.34m pixel size. We weren't able to play around extensively with the phone's camera but clicking a casual indoor shot (under fluorescent light) in the default mode, we observed some minor noise, and slight aberration in colours, though the level of detail was pretty good.