Like its contemporaries, Oppo and Vivo, Gionee of China has also started giving lot of attention to selfie aspects on its phones and has launched in India its powerful A1 smartphone. Priced at an attractive price of Rs. 19,999, this phone has been packed with very impressive hardware besides 16MP selfie camera, which is the highlight of this phone. But Gionee is not overswayed by selfie craze and has built this phone for overall good experience.
Gionee A1 is designed beautifully and has a full metal body made out of A6000 aircraft grade material. The rear panel is soft and the phone is curved on all sides to give it firm grip in your hand. Gionee logo is behind the LED flash on the back and Gionee branding is given at the bottom of the back. Despite the fact that this phone has weight of 183 grams but still you can easily hold it with single hand.
This phone sports a 2.5D curved glass 5.5-inch Full HD AMOLED Display with resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels with Gorilla Glass 3 protection. The display offer bright, vibrant colors and has good viewing angles. The sunlight visibility is not any issue on this phone. You will definitely love to watch your favourite media content and will enjoy playing game on it.
This phone gets power from MediaTek Helio P10 (MT6755) processor combined with 4GB RAM and 64GB ROM extendable to 256GB. The Helio P10 processor is quite fast and I did not face any issue of heating. You can play high-end games on this phone without any hiccups; initiating and switching between the apps is superb. The 4GB RAM is more than sufficent even for high-end users and internal memory can be extended upto 256GB. The call quality on this phone is excellent and it catches 4G signals wherever available. Audio output on this phone is also loud and full volume listening is quite enjoyable.
This phone is being marketed as selfie-focussed phone and this justifies all the claims of the company. On the front, it is mounted with 16MP selfie camera with f/2.0 aperture, 5P lens and selfie flash. The selfie flash feature is very useful and help you to capture images even in low light. Moreover, you can enhance the quality of your captured selfies with the help of Face Beauty feature. The front camera captures very good images even without applying Face Beauty feature but this application is slicing on the cake.
This phone also has 13MP rear camera with AF, f/2.0 aperture, 5P lens and flash. This camera comes with various modes such as Night, Professional, Time-lapse, GIF, slow motion to name a few. I have captured few images with rear camera in different environments and these have come out beautifully with good contrast and actual reproduction of the colors. Some of the images are reproduced below:
Besides its camera capabilites, this phone gets its juice from huge 4100mAh battery which lasts for full day very easily as per my experience even if you are a heavy users. This battery has 18W ultrafast charge and dual charging chips feature but still it takes approxiamtely more than two hours to fully charge from zero. But this long charging is compensated by the fact that you would not to be required to charge it frequently.
This phone has fingerprint sensor on the home button which is very easy to set-up and very quick to unlock the phone. This fingerprint sensor has never failed me to unlock the phone.
This phone runs on the latest Android 7.0 Nougat OS with layer of Amigo 4.0 on the top and for some users, it may be little difficult to adapt to it especially if they want true Android experience. Some of customization done by Gionee is of no use but some of which is also useful. This phone comes pre-loaded with useful apps such as UC browser, Saavn, Swiftkey keyboard and games like Daanger Dash, Real Football, Asphalt Nitro and Bubble Bash 3, which might appeal to gaming lovers.
This phone has all the trappings of a premium phone and will stand in the league of not only selfie-enriched but also a high performing phones. The A1 will compete with Oppo F3 Plus and Vivo V5 Plus. Gionee has price advantage over these two phones. If you are looking for good selfie phone with other good performance and powerful battery then have a serious look at Gionee A1! Pre-booking of this phone began on 31st March.
