Gionee A1 Review - Paperblog

Gionee has been very actively selling smartphones in India’s offline market and the company has been doing remarkably well. In the month of March, Gionee launched their new A-Series smartphone the A1 in India in a bid to tap the growing selfie craze.

We got to test the Gionee A1 for an extended period of time and let us see how does the phone perform in our detailed Gionee A1 review.

Gionee A1 Specifications:

Gionee A1 SAR Value : 1.180 W/Kg @1G Head | 0.346 W/Kg @1G Body

Gionee A1 Unboxed:

Inside the box, you get pretty regular stuff like

Gionee A1 Mobile itself
A Power/Travel Adapter
Earphone
Data cable
SIM eject tool
Quick Start Guide
A Silicone Back Cover
and a Screen protector

Gionee A1 Review: Build and Design

The Gionee A1 comes with a full metal unibody design which has a matte finish. The effort that has been put in designing the phone clearly shows off. The 2.5D curved glass display covers the front and comes with a corning gorilla glass 3 protection.

The sides of the phone are curved with a volume rocker and power button on the right and hybrid SIM card slot on the left. On the top, there is 3.5 MM audio jack while a micro USB charging port is located at the bottom along with speaker grille.

On the front, there is a 16 MP Selfie camera, regular sensors and a Soft selfie flash that we normally see on selfie focused smartphones, on either side of the earpiece. One the bottom of the display, there are 2 customizable capacitive touch buttons on either side of a home button that also houses a fast fingerprint sensor.

A rear facing 13 MP cameras with dual tone flash can be found on the back which sits right above the Gionee logo. This logo is placed exactly where the fingerprint sensor is located in other phones and we kept on trying to unlock the device by pressing a finger there. It took some time to get used to this. Another Gionee branding can be found at the bottom part.

While the A1 has a large form factor and the phone is slightly on a heavier side due to the large battery pack inside, we did not have any issues while using the smartphone. The physical buttons were easily reachable and have a sturdy build quality. One hand operation is not an issue at all with the Gionee A1. Although the overall design is quite simial to what we see in almost all the devices in budget segment and it has started feeling monotonous, we absolutely loved the build quality.

Gionee A1 Review: Display

Gionee A1 comes with a 5.5-inch FHD AMOLED display with a resolution of 1920*1080 pixels (pixel density of 401 ppi). The display is clear and bright with good viewing angles. Everything looks so crisp on the display and sunlight legibility was also very good. The color reproduction was vivid and punchy making the A1 an automatic choice for multimedia consumption. In my opinion, Gionee A1 has one of the

The color reproduction was vivid and punchy making the A1 an automatic choice for multimedia consumption. In my opinion, Gionee A1 has one of the best display in this segment.There’s an oleophobic coating on the display making it fingerprint and smudge-proof.

Gionee A1 Review: Performance

Gionee A1 comes with an octa-core MediaTek Helio P10 MT6755 processor along with a Mali-T860MP2 GPU and 4 GB RAM. We were sort of disappointed with the Helio P10 processor, however, to my surprise the device performed really well.

Opening and managing multiple apps simultaneously wasn’t an issue. There were no heating issues as such while using the phone normally, but while playing Asphalt 8 I could feel the metal back warming up, although it never was unbearable. There were absolutely no lag or frame drops while playing graphic intensive games.

The phone supports VoLTE and I used Reliance Jio on Gionee A1 which worked seamlessly. The fingerprint sensor on Gionee A1 is extremely fast and responsive. With around 1.8 to 1.9GB RAM available the performance of the phone is buttery smooth. Apart from a random app crash there wasnt much of an issue with the phone.

Gionee A1 Review: Battery

The Gionee A1 comes with a 4010 mAh battery and we found that it lasted a day easily with around 20% battery left while the company claims up to two days of backup with mixed usage.

While we expected a bit more considering the sheer battery pack’s size a bit of tweaking with display and brightness may help in extending it further. Gionee A1 supports fast charging if you use the bundled cable and the power brick which is rated at 2A.

Also Read

Vivo V5s Review

Gionee A1 Review: Software

Gionee’s Amigo UI is heavily customized while users these days prefer near stock android experience. The A1 comes with Amigo UI on top of Android 7.0 Nougat. Most of the UI on Chinese phones comes with almost similar UI. To open quick toggle you need to slide up and the app drawer is missing.

While the UI is heavy it is well optimized and it the phone does not lag at all. You can find a few pre-installed apps with the first boot up. These could’ve been avoided. I’m not a very big fan of themes and wallpaper apps as they eat up space and bandwidth and these apps can be avoided to keep the UI light.

There are other nifty features which are very useful. You can customize the capacitive touch buttons from setting and swiping on the fingerprint sensor left to right or vice versa, opens a quick menu on from either side of the screen, nifty and useful feature.

Gionee A1 Review: Camera

Apart from aa huge battery, a great display, the highlight of Gionee A1 is its camera, especially the front camera. The A1 comes with a 16 MP selfie camera with f/2.0 aperture lens and a soft LED flash while on the back there is a 13 MP camera with f/2.0 aperture lens, a dual LED flash, phase detection autofocus, and other basic camera features.

The front camera can deliver good pictures in proper lighting conditions. You also have various modes like mood photos, face beauty, smart scene, Time Lapse and Slowmotion etc built in. However, in low light you cant expect much from both the rear or front cameras.

The front diffused LED flash help in clicking better selfies during low. If you’re a fan of using filters and face beauty software, then you’ll love the phone. Color reproduction from the rear camera was good but the lack of details and issues with sharp focus could be noticed. There is another feature called “beautified videos” which can make your videos lively. Overall the camera performance is fast but low light images leave a lot to be desired.

Save