These days people are craze of taking selfies, or we can say taking our own photo using our front facing camera is increasing very dramatically. Everyone is getting addicted towards it, and mostly girls are getting too much self-obsessed using this selfie kind of stuff. Personally, I also love taking selfies but when you have a phone which is selfie-centric and tagline for the brand is defined as “Welcome to Selfiestan” then taking photos using that front-facing camera makes you addicted towards it. So, today we are having the latest device from Gionee i.e. Gionee A1, which was launched a few days back in India with the effective price of Rs. 19,999 and as of now is on Pre-order.
Gionee A1 (3D View):Â Coming Soon
So, Let’s see how Gionee A1 is going to perform in this real crucial world and does this selfistan is really selfie-centric or not.
Gionee A1 – Box Content
The Device comes in the well built box. Opening it from the top first we get the phone and nothing else. To get other accessories, we need open it further:
Accessories which comes within the box are:
- Fast Charger
- High-Quality Type Micro USB cable
- User Manuals
- High-Quality Premium In-Ear Earphones
- Premium TPU Case
- High-Quality Screen Guard
Design & Built
Gionee A1 is available in three colors Grey, Black and Gold. When I first picked up the device in hand it feels sturdy and well built. I would say Gionee has really worked hard on their new device. Each and every small detail is being taken care which we can notice on the power lock key which I will explain later. Built quality of Gionee A1 is really A1 no complaints regarding it.
Starting with the front part of the phone at the top we get a 16-Megapixel Shooter beside it a LED flash, or I would say LED Light which different effect as per your choice. Beside that you get earpiece, different sensors and a no LED notification Light, in spite of LED Notification Front Flash works as a LED Notification if you enable it from setting panel.
Sliding down you get a 5.5″ FHD AMOLED Display, with a added 2.5d Curved glass on top of it.
Below that you get back capacitive keys which don’t light up. We just have two small white color dots over there. Between that houses a Home button which we can actually press. That home button also acts as a Fingerprint sensor which is insanely accurate and fast just like we see in Oneplus 3T. I rather love its fingerprint sensor just a small tap on fingerprint, and it will unlock the device.
Now, coming to the down portion of the phone you get a Micro USB port which do support fast charging, besides that you get Dual Speaker grills out of which right one is having the actual speaker and left one is having the primary MIC in it.
Turning around to the top side you just get a 3.5mm Audio jack and nothing else.
Coming to the left portion of the phone you get a Hybrid SIM tray which supports Dual sim or single sim + MicroSD card that to up to 256GB.
Turning the phone to the right side, you get volume rockers and power lock keys which work perfectly fine and made up of metal. We also have Chamfered cut design available on volume rockers and power lock key. This is not enough to get more detailing in the phone Gionee has added color different among all the buttons. We get silver Chamfered edge on volume rockers where as we get Red color Chamfered edge on Power Lock key. This is what I was talking about earlier in the article.
Coming to the back side of the the phone you get a 13-megapixel primary camera below that a single tone LED flash and besides that flash there is a hidden IR blaster which also has a great functionality which we see in LeEco device which is way better than MI device just because of added universal remote feature in it. Below that you get a nicely done Gionee Logo which is made inside a circular ring and looks good and coming down you get a Gionee branding and nothing much which need to explain over here.
Display
Gionee A1 comes up with a 5.5-inch FHD Amoled Display with the resolution of 1920 x 1080 and pixel density of 401 ppi, which makes it look better. The colors are vibrant and dark. They are more towards the natural side and feels comfortable to eyes. White balance feels perfect and makes it a pleasant display to use even in bright sunlight. There are different color profiles that you can choose as per your comfortability by going into the setting panel.
Auto-brightness work perfectly, and I have no complaints regarding the display. Watching movies is awesome because we are getting Amoled Display and not any ordinary display. Viewing Angle is good and odd angle won’t affect you in any way. Overall I love the display.
Performance
The Gionee A1 comes with MediaTek MT6755 which is Helio P10 octa-core SoC paired with Mali-T860MP2 and a 4GB RAM. There we get 64GB of internal storage which can be expanded by up to 256GB using a microSD card slot.
Even the device has Helio p10 in it, it can some how to handle all graphic intensive games such as GTA San Andreas, Bully, Batman, Nova 3 and much more, but few games like asphalt 8 and 2 brother give some frame drops quite a few times don’t know why, even asphalt 8 extreme is working fine may be some bug is there. The best part is that even after playing the games for more than 30 minutes it won’t heat up the max temperature I got was 39- Degree that is quite normal that too in Delhi Hot Temperature. The phone functions smoothly even after there is more than 10 open in the background.
Some issue which I faced in the UI was apps get crashed, where i need restart the app to work on it. It is not always but few times in a day. The camera app sometime gets laggy while you are recording on FHD, but if you use a third party app to record videos, it works perfectly fine. Hope all these issues can be fixed by gionee in there next OTA update.
We forgot to mention about the sensors which are available in Gionee A1 so I would say we have all the sensors which a person need a phone you can even use a VR on the phone with no hassle.
Camera
Starting with the most highlighted feature of Gionee A1 i.e. its 16-megapixel selfie camera with LED flash which allows you to take brighter and better photos even in low-light. To add more effect the camera app comes with a ‘face beauty’ mode, which allows you to smoother your skin tone, removing wrinkles, slimming down your face and much more. Allowing you to have smoother and wrinkle-free selfies. This is not enough because it supports HDR mode in selfies.
I would say Gionee A1 does take some good front facing photos in daylight as well as in no light. Rest, everyone is going to love the selfie’s taking from the front facing camera of Gionee.
Now coming to the rear camera, here we get a 13-megapixel sensor with LED flash. There are different modes which we get in the app like Pro mode, night mode, time lapse, slow motion, text recognition, and text translation and many other. The camera UI is very simple and easy to use, but sometime get laggy may be due to UI which I have already explained earlier in the article.
As per my views, rear camera of Gionee A1 is a bit average and we cannot compare the same with other budget oriented devices because this phone is more towards offline-centric and not online centric. But, still It takes pretty good photos in good light but significantly get noise in low-light conditions.
Camera Samples
Software
The Gionee A1 comes with Android 7.0 Nougat out-of-the-box with their custom skin Amigo UI on top of it. They have customized a whole lot of stuff in their UI, and I would say it is buttery smooth even after filling the whole 64GB internal storage, with games, movies, and songs. In Amigo UI we don’t get any app drawer or on screen buttons just like iPhone.
Overall, the UI is quite good, but the person who love stock then this device is not for you, you will get so many customizations right in your hand out of the box. There are some minor bugs, but we can expect those bugs to be fixed by gionee in next coming OTA updates.
Battery
Coming to the battery part of the phone here we are getting 4010 mAh battery. On moderate or even too high usage, the smartphone will easily last you a full day on a single charge, and even more, it depends on your usage. I was Using Jio Sim + 15 minutes approx gaming, continuous whatsapp, facebook and other social media, some selfies and at the end of the day the remaining battery was 45% which seems to be quite good for me. There we also get some energy saving modes which will further optimize your battery life. You can choose different battery modes between normal mode, power saving mode which reduces performance and finally an extreme mode which will switch off all the stuff and you will be able to use some basic features like phone, contact, messaging in it.
It also comes with a fast charger and fast charging support and took about 1 hour 30 minutes to charge from 0% to 100% using a stock charger which we get inside the box.
Verdict
Apart from the Price which is Rs. 19,999; I would say gionee has made something different in there now. As gionee is always offline focused brand and will be there future as well. So, when we compare Gionee A1 with other available offline brands, this is going to be a huge competition.
Pros
- Great Built (Minor Detailing is also taken care)
- Display
- Selfie Camera + Different modes
- Battery Backup
- Fast Charging
- Getting 2 Years Warranty + JBL earphones or swiss Speaker on Pre-Order
Cons
- Bit Pricy (If we compare with online market)
- Old Processor (still due to UI it manages to work well)
- No Led Notification (We Get LED Flash Work As LED notification)
Wow! Looks like a nice phone.