Gionee A1 was first announced last month at the Mobile World Congress 2017 and the company has finally drop the curtains from the device in India a couple of days back. The device will be available via Amazon India as well as via various offline stores across India. We had been using the device for some time and here is our review.
Design
The design is an area where the mobile manufacturers should really work and for past couple of years the design innovation curve as been a flat line. In other words, we get the same old metallic design with slight curves around the edges. Gionee A1 comes in 3 different colour variants namely Black, Gold, Grey out of which we received the Gold colour variant.
Taking the device in hands, you will surely feel a premium and sturdy piece of hardware with the power button and volume rockers on the right, which is easy to reach despite a large form factor. Coming to the rear panel, we get the primary camera along with dual tone LED flash while on the left side is where the Hybrid dual SIM slot is placed. At the front is the selfie camera along with few Sensors just above the screen and at the bottom of the screen, we get the physical home button sandwiched between two touch type capacitive buttons which are swappable through the software. Further, the home button acts as a fingerprint scanner which was accurate and fast. Even though a fingerprint scanner at the back is more convenient for most of us, but there are users who prefer it on the front. Nevertheless, Gionee A1 has nothing refreshing in terms of design but doesn’t mean we are disappointed.
Display & User Interface
With Gionee A1, the company went with a5.5-inch Full HD IPS LCD display with a Pixel density of 401 ppi along with 1920 x 1080 pixels. Jumping to how it feels, even in the bright sun the display performs well with good viewing angles and the ambient light sensor for auto brightness does its job well.
When we talk about the usability, the screen provides a good and vivid array of colours. On top of it, the combination with a 5.5-inchscreen, it makes up for a pretty enjoyable experience.
Coming to the user interface, It is smooth and not for even once it lagged while navigating or doing multitasking. Amigo OS 4.0 on top of Android 7.0 Nougat offers ample of options to customise inside the UI ranging from split-screen multitasking to different native Android customisations, But there is one bug and that occurs when you play videos in youtube App on full-screen mode and the video has been buffered half way through, in this condition if one presses the “Home” button, the video will continue to play in the background, the downside of this bug is that if you are using the internet through a carrier network, it might consume unwanted data.
Performance
Packed with 2.0 GHz Octa-Core MediaTek MT6755 Helio P10 Processor along with 4GB ram. The device comes with 64GB of internal storage which is further expandable up to 256 GB via microSD card (hybrid Dual SIM slot). Walking around with the Gionee A1 was a pleasant experience. We didn’t face any issues related to the performance. Our regular day included watching a lot of videos on Youtube, playing graphic intensive games such as Asphalt 8, Nova 3 and Marvel contest of the champions along with some casual music listening.
The device can handle moderate to aggressive use quite easily and that’s what we expected from a device with such internals. Keeping the good things aside, we did face some minor issues including the one in which couple of times ‘end call’ button would not respond. Further, another notable issue with most of the Helio P10 devices is overheating while prolonged gaming experiences which ispresent here as well.
Camera
The camera is probably one of the best features on the Gionee A1 especially when we talk about the front camera which boasts 16-MP Resolution coupled with a front facing LED Flash. The front and the back camera are both equipped with a number of modes that you can choose from such as beautification, panorama view and Night mode.
Talking about the front camera, we were able to capture some high-resolution good quality photos with some decent colour reproduction and details. The performance was also up with other mid-range even in the low-lighting conditions. Coming on the main camera Gionee A1 sports a 13 Mega-Pixel along with 1/3″ sensor size, 1.12 µm pixel size, geo-tagging, touch focus, face detection, HDR and can record videos at 1080p @30FPS. In daylight the pictures come out to be good although we noticed a lot of post image processing going on. To summarize, the camera on the Gionee A1 shows some inconsistency. You can click some pretty solid pictures from this device, but you have to be careful about it.
Battery & Sound
Coming to the audio output, the speakers on the Gionee A1 just decent. The voice from the single bottom-firing speaker is loud and clear, however, it is surely not the best in terms of the overall quality. Placed at the bottom, the speakers are also easy to block while playing games in landscape mode. hence the placementof the speakers is not very good.
Another USP of the Gionee A1 is the battery which is of 4010 mAh capacity and starting our day at 7:30 AM, the Gionee A1 would easily last you a day and can also go beyond depending on your usage patterns. Also, the company has given in a fast charger as well which, as claimed by the company, can charge the device within 2 hours.