Gionee Elife E6 Review

When we first heard of Gionee, we jumped the gun in thinking that it’s just another Chinese smartphone brand trying to shove its way into a crowded Indian market. While being an ODM for many big brands across the globe, Gionee is now trying to establish themselves as a smartphone brand and we must say they’re doing a stellar job at that. HTC started out in a similar manner around a decade ago and it seems like Gionee is taking that same path. Their Elife E3 packed with great features and performance for the price and now, we take a look at their recently launched flagship – the Elife E6. We spent some time with the handset at the launch and here’s our final take on it after having used it for a couple of weeks.

Design and Build
The E6 is easily the best built Chinese droid we’ve come across to date. The unibody plastic chassis lends an understated premiumness to the phone and the matt texture keeps fingerprints at bay, for the most part. The E6 is fairly slim at 7.9mm and light as well. There are three capacitive buttons in the front and a 5MP front-facing camera up top. The buttons on the side are well placed although we would have liked it better if the power button was on the side rather than on top.

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Easily one of the best looking Chinese droids in the market

The speaker grill is on the bottom along with the microUSB charging port. This design choice is also very reminiscent of Apple’s iPhone 5. Around the back, we just have the 13MP camera and a single LED flash. The Gionee branding is discretely placed at the bottom of the phone. Overall, the E6 scores full marks for design and aesthetics and easily rivals phones priced much higher.

Sleek and understated look

Features
The display is one of the highlights of the E6. Armed with a IPS Full HD panel at 5-inches diagonally, text is crisp and colours are rich and vibrant. To top it off, the OGS (One Glass Solution) and Gorilla Glass 3 gives the handset better sensitivity and scratch resistance. Sunlight legibility is strictly average however. The E6 comes with 4.2.1 but is heavily skinned with very little resemblance to stock Android. The skin is also incredibly laggy and very confusing as the icon set is completely different. The theme is more akin to iOS where all the apps are on the home screen instead of the app drawer system on stock Android. The UI performance improves slightly with Go Launcher but not by much.

The UI may look pretty but it’s not very user friendly

The E6 is powered by a Mediatek MTK6589T SoC running at 1.5GHz. There’s also 2GB of RAM onboard, a first we’ve come across in Chinese handsets. There’s no memory expansion but the 32GB onboard should keep most happy. The handset is bundled with a couple of apps from Gionee including support for gestures, OTA updates and Game Zone. There are a couple of productivity apps as well like file manager, office suite,flashlight etc., and the ability to change themes. We didn’t like the UI one bit as it’s too cluttered and very laggy.

Fares well in benchmarks

Media
The music player has a simple interface allowing you to quickly browse through your music through genres, album, artists, etc. There’s also DTS 3D Surround enhancement which helps over headphones. The volume level, however, is quite low and is not loud enough even with a good pair of IEMs. The same goes for the speaker volume as well. Alerts are difficult to hear in crowded environments. For video files, MKV’s play back just fine as do Full HD videos.

Media playback is hampered by the low volume output

Connectivity
The Gionee Elife E6 is a quad-band GSM and a dual-band 3G phone. You also get Wi-Fi ‘n’, Bluetooth v4.0. There’s no NFC or GLONASS in the handset. The E6 is not a dual-SIM handset like most other Chinese phones. Call quality was good even in noisy environments, however, the proximity sensor seemed to be on the fritz. The screen would keep switching on while on a call which in turn would activate random buttons, often cutting the call.

Plenty of apps to choose from

Camera
The 13MP camera does a decent job of snapping macros and landscape photos. The detail level isn’t great when you zoom in all the way but if you’re only going to view them on the phone then it’s pretty good. There are a whole bunch of camera modes like panorama, eraser effects, best face, best shot as well as the ability to adjust the white balance and colour effect.

Outdoor shots are pretty good when viewed on the phone

Indoors isn’t too bad either but zooming in reveals the lack of detail

Video recording maxes out at 1080p with average quality. The frame rate is steady whether you’re shooting indoors or out.

Battery Life
The 2000mAh battery failed to complete our 8-hour loop test. Video playback drained it the most as it dropped from a full charge to under 50 percent after 2 hours and 40 minutes of video. This is below average compared to most smartphones we’ve seen lately.

Verdict and Price in India
The Gionee Elife E6 is priced at Rs 22,999 which is on the expensive side considering its performance. At this price point, one can find the Samsung Galaxy S4 mini, Sony Xperia SP, Nokia Lumia 920 - all of which make a better buy. Pricing is not the main issue with the E6 however. The low volume level for the speaker and headphone jack is a problem, the proximity sensor doesn’t work very well and battery life is below average. The fact that the E6 fails in these rudimentary areas makes it tough to recommend even if the price drops to sub-20k. Gionee is definitely on the right track in their attempt to compete with the big boys. They’ve nailed the design and aesthetics to the T with the E6 and now it’s time to tweak and fix some of the basic features that we all take for granted. Perhaps they’ll have better luck with the E7.