Gionee S6s first impressions: An average selfie smartphone with an attractive design

Gionee is yet another Chinese smartphone company that has a strong presence in India. The company primarily offers three feature based segments wherein they focus on styling in the S series, photography in the E series and battery in the M series. Today the company launched a combination of two its series called the S6s, a slim metal smartphone focusing on a good photography experience especially if you like taking selfies. Here is a a quick look at the smartphone. Design and build The smartphone has a solid metal design along with a 2.5D curved glass up front. It feels and looks great, although it doesn’t offer anything unique when compared to other smartphones in the same price segment.

At the front there is a 5.5-inch full HD display with capacitive buttons below it while the earpiece, front camera and light sensors sit above it. The front is glossy but the curved edges give the smartphone a nice feel. The back is all metal with a matte finish so the chances of slipping are less. At the back is the rear camera with an LED flash, a round fingerprint scanner, the new shiny Gionee logo and the speaker grill.

Moving to the edges, the volume and power buttons have a clean finish and sit on the right edge, the SIM card tray on the left edge while the headphone jack and microUSB port are placed on the bottom edge.

Gionee has not left a lot to complain, but as mentioned before, there isn’t anything that sets it apart from its competition. Display The smartphone features a 5.5-inch display with a full HD resolution. The company has utilised an IPS in-cell panel which works quite well. The colours look punchy and everything seems quite sharp. Even the brightness is well maintained. The display is protected with a 2.5D curved Gorilla Glass 3 which maintains a good feedback for the touch panel. We only managed to use the device indoors for a few minutes, so we can’t say much about the viewing angles or the outdoor capability of the panel. Hardware Gionee usually utilises MediaTek processors and once again the company is relying on the company to power its new smartphone. The Gionee S6s features a MediaTek MT6753 octa-core processor which is a 64-bit processor clocked at 1.3GHz. It utilises Cortex-A53 cores. Paired with the processor is 3GB of RAM and a Mali-T720 GPU. Gionee India CEO, Arvind Vohra mentioned that MediaTek processors have always been efficient and the company relies on providing experience through hardware rather than the opposite. For storage there is 32GB of internal memory which can be further expanded using a microSD card of up to 128GB. Performance and OS The S6s comes with Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box with Gionee’s Amigo UI 3.2 on top. It didn’t feel that different from previous versions although the experience on the device felt smooth and lag free. Of course we need to test it properly before we can judge its performance capabilities. Camera The company has said to focus heavily in this department. The smartphone has a 13MP rear camera utilising a Sony IMX258 image sensor and an f/2.0 aperture and an LED flash. The front camera has an 8MP sensor with an f/2.2 aperture, 5P lens setup and an LED flash for brighter selfies.

Overall the camera performance is decent, even the selfies came out to be appealing. Colours look good on the display, although low light selfies seem to be getting soft. The camera app itself offers a a long list of modes and features including a pro mode, HDR, face beauty, panorama, GIF, night mode, time-lapse, and so on. The cameras are decent, but equally good smartphone cameras are available at a cheaper price. Battery and connectivity The battery unit is rated at 3,150mAH which sounds pretty decent. The company didnt say much about the battery life but we expect a day worth of charge. In the connectivity department, the smartphone LTE, VoLTE, dual-SIM dual standby, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB OTG and the usual GPS standards.

Conclusion The Gionee S6s is just a good looking device. The selfie camera is decent and does the job well, but it isn’t something worth spending Rs 17,999. But if you really are looking for a selfie-centric smartphone, then the Oppo F1s is a much better option. Apart from offering a better resolution it seems to offer a superiro quality. There also a number of other smartphones in the market that may not offer a superior selfie camera, but do offer a similar experience and image quality.