Gionee Elife S7 first impressions: Sleek and sturdy with a good camera; but will users pay Rs 24,999?

Gionee’s Elife S7, a member of its super-slim S series, finally arrives in India. First unveiled at the MWC 2015, the device is **launched in India at Rs 24,999** . The device was launched amidst much fanfare at an event in Hyderabad and we’ve had the chance to play around with it for some time. Here are our first impressions of the Gionee Elife S7. Design and Build quality    Gionee’s love for thin, sleek phones is well known. Though the S7 isn’t as thin as its 5.1mm predecessor Gionee Elife S5.1, it is still sleek at mere 5.5mm. In spite of the sleek body, it feels pretty solid and sturdy to hold. Built of magnesium alloy, it sports a metal frame and a glass back. Both front and back are protected with a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass 3. The phone design has a U shaped curve, which is to ensure a better grip. In spite of the sleek body, there’s no camera buldge, something we really liked.  The left edge accommodates two SIM card slots, both support LTE. The lower edge has a mic, 3.5mm audio jack and speaker outlet. The right side is fitted with the power and volume buttons. The device design isn’t a head-turner, but it definitely looks premium, sleek and feels very light to hold. Dipped in black, white and blue colors, it measures 139.8 x 67.4 x 5.5 mm. Display  Not uncomfortably large yet following the latest trend of phablets, the Elife S7 sports a 5.2-inch full HD (1,920 x 1,080) AMOLED display along with a layer of Gorilla Glass 3 protection and 424ppi pixel density. We found that the AMOLED display ensures good viewing angles. It is bright and the colour reproduction looks natural and vibrant. OS  The Gionee Elife S7 runs the company new Amigo 3.0 user interface, which is based on the latest Android 5.0 Lollipop iteration. The new Amigo 3.0 brings some subtle changes. Firstly, you will notice that one has to swipe upwards from the bottom to view the notifications. Interestingly, it comes with the Chameleon mode that picks a colour from a picture that you’ve shot and applies it to the phone’s interface. You won’t find a dedicated app drawer and all the apps are scattered on the homepage. Camera  The Gionee Elife S7 comes with a 13MP rear snapper and also plans to woo selfie lovers with its 8MP front-facing camera. We tried taking some shots using the rear camera and they came out to be good and pretty detailed. Some photos appeared oversaturated. Though, it could also be because of the light conditions here. We couldn’t test the camera’s low light abilities, which we could do once the device reaches our test labs. Gionee claims 500ms of capture time and 300ms of focus time, which should be very fast. We did find tap to focus to be very quick. Battery  The device comes equipped with a 2,700mAh battery. It may not be enough for the huge display, but Gionee promises technology that helps with prolonged battery life. The company also includes several power saving modes including the ‘Extreme power saving mode’. On paper, the company promises 33 hours and 45 minutes of standby time. However, we would only be able to comment on the battery life once we’ve conducted our loop test. Other specs and performance The smartphone is powered by a MediaTek octa-core processor, each core clocked at 1.7GHz. It is also coupled with 2GB RAM. In India, it is available with 16GB onboard storage. The company hasn’t announced its 32GB variant here and there is also no option for microSD card slot. In our limited testing of the smartphone, we found it to be very quick and there were no lags. However, it may possibly change with prolonged usage of the device and heavy multitasking. Bottomline Though not a seasoned OEM, the face of Chinese manufacturers have been changing in India. But unlike its competitors like Xiaomi who are wooing audiences with budget devices, Gionee seems to be targeting sub-30K device segment and also prefers offline retailers. We liked that Gionee Elife S7 didn’t compete to surpass its competitors 4.85mm Oppo R5 or 4.75mm Vivo, and instead focused on several other aspects. It is good looking, sleek yet built of sturdy material, UI seems to be slick and has a plethora d decent specs and features, but the question boils down to will you pay Rs 24,999. However, it does come across as a good imaging smartphone available at that price, and the sleek form factor and dual SIM 4G support seem like the icing on the cake. We will still hold our final judgement for its overall performance until we’ve taken it for a spin in our labs for a complete review.