Gionee Elife S8 with 3D touch: First Look

The Chinese manufacturing company Gionee has produced decent mobiles which vary from mid class budget phones to some expensive mobiles. There have been some pretty decent mobiles like Gionee Elife S 5.5 and E7 mini which gave pretty tough competition to many big companies in terms of specs and features they offered. But finally it comes to your personal opinion which mobile you want to choose. Let's dig in.




Design:

Initially I felt like am using a phone whose design is inspired my Samsung old plastic devices like Galaxy S4 and S5 but on the contrary Gionee Elife S8 is not made of plastic. It has uni-body metal design which gives a good premium feel. It comes in four different colors, Silver, Rose Gold, Black and White. The home button has finger print sensor and that is how I felt it is Samsung inspired in terms of placing the home button as well as it's design. The home button has capacitive touch buttons on either side which are back lit.

 The front side of the phone has a 8 mega pixel camera with flash and main shooter is 16 mega pixel camera on rear side. The back cover is non removable. The bottom side has USB charging slot, 3.5 mm ear phone jack and speaker grill. I feel like this design is inspired by iPhone which has similar placement of these slots. The phone comes with a memory card slot and two GSM sim slots.It weighs 147 grams and 7 mm thick which is pretty slim.

I feel that this phone is pretty much a hybrid of Samsung and iPhone in terms of design.


Specs and Features:

Gionee Elife S8 comes with a 5.5 inch full HD AMOLED display with a resolution of 1080 X 1920 pixels at 401 pixels per inch. The screen is scratch proof with Corning Gorilla Glass 4. It has very good viewing angles but 401 ppi is pretty low considering the present generation top end phones which come with 450 + ppi.

The phone runs on 1.9 GHz Octa Core, Mediatek MT6755 Helio 10 processor with a 4 GB of RAM. As Helio processors are pretty new in Indian Market we are unable to deeply analyze the benchmark scores. But it's a pretty good processor and I had no lagging or heating issues even on heavy use.

Gionee Elife S8 comes with internal storage of 64 GB which is expandable up to 128 GB. The main camera is a 16 mega pixel shooter which is pretty decent and took very sharp images on bright conditions. The auto focus was very good and produced accurate colors. The specialty of Gionee's camera is that they have added several modes to video recording menu. We find many modes in photo menu in almost all mobiles but some thing to be noted here is the options they provide in recording menu. We have several shooting modes like HDR, low light mode, night mode, QR scan mode etc. which is a pretty good add-on.

The Gionee Elife S8 runs on Google Android 6.0 Marshmallow over Gionee's Amigo UI. I was pretty bothered about lot of bloatware that comes default with the phone which are not much useful and you can't remove them. But the Amigo UI is more refined and buttery smooth than it was on previous models. Multi tasking was hastle free and I couldn't see any lags.

The introduction of 3D touch in Gionee Elife S8 is what made me say that this phone is a hybrid of iPhone and Samsung. This phone also comes with 3D touch similar to iPhone but it is not as refined as iPhone. They may fix this in further updates.

Gionee Elife S8 has 3000 mAh battery capacity which will lost for complete day on moderate to heavy use. The phone is not dust proof or water proof.

Verdict:
 The phone has pretty decent add-ons which are inspired by other mobiles but can it be as good competitor to other mobiles? Well we have to see as it is little pricey too, around 35,000 INR.

I can say it's a pretty good mobile with a mixture of features but in terms of software it still needs to be refined a lot.