Gionee is the first Chinese brand which arrived in India in the year 2013 with lot of pride and confidence despite the wrong notion at that time about Chinese phones. Gionee is instrumental in changing that perception with the introduction of various smartphones in different price point. Gionee is also the first company in the world to introduce the slimmest smartphone Elife S5.5. Gionee is now well-established brand in India and to take its success story forward, it has launched today Elife E8 flagship smartphone in India which was unveiled in China in the month of June.
The Elife E8 is a phablet in a true sense of the word as it comes with 6 inch display. This is bulky device and measures 164 x 82.3 x 9.6mm, and its weight is 207 grams.The phone has thin bezels and looks very sleek overall but it can’t be operated with single hand and you can’t tuck this in your pocket also. The plus point of design is that it is made of metal which gives it premimum and elegant look.The volume rocker, power buttons have been located on the right side of this device. Gionee has provided physical camera shutter buttons on the right side which are nowadays not to be seen on majority of smartphones.
Four holes have been provided on top of the rear camera and secondary mic for noise cancellation is also on the rear side of the device. The speaker grill is placed on the front side. The large 24 MP sensor on the rear has been placed very nicely and there is no bulge which we have seen even on expensive smartphone such as Galaxy S6.
The highlight of Elife E8 is its optics capabilites. It boasts of 24 MP rear camera, which is capable of producing photographs up to 120 megapixels thanks to Phase Detection Auto Focus (PDAF) technology employed on it. In fast mode, you can click images in just 0.3 seconds whereas normally the smartphones camera take 0.08 to 0.20 seconds to focus and while testing the camera at the launch event, we noticed that this feature is quite impressive and it really takes the claimed time to click the images.
The Elife E8 is the first Android smartphone, which is claimed to offer lossless zoom that maintains image quality even at 3X zoom along with other camera features such as sapphire glass for the lens, optical image stabilisation, 4K video recording etc.The Elife E8 also include an 8 MP front camera for taking selfies. We have tested the camera capabilites for very short time spent on the Elife E8 and could see that images looked true to original, with perfect contrast and depth. We shall have to test the camera in different lighting conditions to see the difference in reproduction of images especially in fading light. This phablet also incorporates 8MP front shooter for capturing selfies and the selfie results were also found to be good.
The display of this phablet is quite impressive and produces sharp and crisp images as it flaunts a 6-inch QuadHD (2560 x 1440) AMOLED panel. If you like large screen then this is definitely the phone you can consider. You can enjoy watching movies, browsing and your other mult-media activities.
This is vey powerful phablet as it is driven by MediaTek’s Helio X10 (MT6795) 64-bit octa-core processor combined with 3GB RAM and 64 GB of internal storage which is not extendable further. During the short time spent on this phablet, we did not face any lag. Switching between the apps is quite smooth and 3GB RAM provided on this device is quite enough. The real test of this device would be after playing resourceful games which we are quite sure won’t be any issue on this device because of very high-end processor under the hood.
The Elife 8 is packed with quite large 3520mAh battery with fast charging feature which in our opinion will keep alive the phone atleast for 8 to 10 hours depending upon the usage pattern. The battery capacity looks quite good but we shall be able to comment further after detailed testing when we get the device.
The Elife E8 comes with two SIM card slots, and offers 4G LTE connectivity. It runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop along with Gionee’s Amigo OS 3.1 which has been updated recently. It comes with fingerprint scanner located below the camera sensor on the back, which is claimed to be very fast responsive.
Conclusion
Although, it is very difficult to pass judgement after experiencing a device for few minutes yet our initial reaction can be considered positive based on build quality, display and camera capabilites of Elife E8. If you are fan of big screen device and do not care about keeping your phone in your pocket unlike me then you can certainly have a serious dekho at this superb device. After going through this device initially, you would certainly feel like owning it provided you are prepare to shell out Rs. 35K.
