Gionee had launched the slimmest smartphone at the Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona and also officially announced it in India couple of months back. It went on sale in India last month. The device comes with impressive specs in the form of 5 inch Full HD display and powered by 1.7Ghz true Octa Core processor with 2GB RAM. There is also 16GB internal storage, but does not have the micro SD expansion option.
The phone also features a 13MP camera with LED flash and a 5MP front facing camera. The phone comes with 2350mAh battery and has glass finish for both the front and rear panels and has Gorilla Glass 3 protection. The phone is priced at Rs 22999 and today we take a detailed look into the phone with respect to the design, build, display, performance, camera, gaming and battery life to find out if it is really worth the money.
Related Reading: Gionee Elife S5.5 Unboxing
Before we go into the detailed review, lets first summarize the specs of the device.
Gionee Elife S5.5 specifications
- 5-inch (1920 x 1080 pixels) Full HD Super AMOLED display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection
- 1.7 GHz Octa-core MediaTek MT6592 processor with Mali 450-MP4 GPU
- Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean) with Amigo 2.0 UI
- 13MP auto focus camera with LED flash, Stacked Sony sensor, 1080p video recording
- 5MP front-facing camera
- Dimensions: 145.1×70.2×5.55mm; Weight: 130 grams
- 2GB LPDDR3 RAM, 16GB internal memory
- 3G, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, WIFI Direct, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS, USB OTG
- 2300 mAh battery
Here is the video review of the phone, if you want the text version, read on.
Design, Build and Display:
The design is one of the best aspect of the phone and Gionee has managed to fit it the best possible configure in a sleek 5.5mm body. The build quality, fit and finish of the device is really good and feels really nice in hands. The power and volume keys are on the left side which makes it a bit difficult to use if you are familiar with power button on the right side.
The SIM card slot is on the right side and you have the USB charging slot at the top and 3.5mm audio jack at the bottom. The phone has the usual set of sensors and three capacitive touch buttons. The phone comes with a unibody design with non-removable back covers and the back panel houses the 13MP camera along with the flash unit. The camera unit has a slight projection and this might be concern if phone falls down on its back.
The phone has beautiful Full HD 5.5 inch display which has corning gorilla glass 3 protection. The display on the device is really good especially for watching videos and playing games. The colors are pretty good on the display although at time you might feel it is a bit over saturated.
Software and Performance:
The device runs on Octa core processor with 2GB RAM and comes with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and Amigo UI on top of it. Software is one of the weakest links of the phone as it is two iterations behind the current version of Android 4.4 KitKat, but good news is that Gionee has announced that KitKat would be announced soon for this device. Amigo UI is the same which we found on the flagship phone Elife E7. The Amigo UI is pretty heavy with customizations and misses out on few aspects like no support for widgets, but comes with few themes built in.
Even with the Octa Core processor and 2GB RAM, there are some performance issues with the device and this is because of the Amigo UI which is heavy on resources and not optimized. You can clearly see the lag when switching apps and also in the home screen. There are few gestures available in the UI and it supports features like double tap to wake and accept calls using gestures.
The phone comes with 16GB storage and there is 6.52GB for system and 9.48GB for phone. You can move apps between the two storage. Gionee has added some useful apps in the form of App Manager, Power manager, Traffic Assistant and Phone Accelerator which are pretty handy tools.
The phone also supports USB OTG out of the box and the company has included a USB OTG cable in the box. The gaming performance of the device is also great, but since it has a glass rear panel and pretty slim, there is lot of heating up when you play games or use the camera for long time.
Related Watching: Gionee Elife S5.5 Gaming Performance
Camera:
The device comes with a 13MP camera with LED flash and a 5MP front camera. The device on the phone is pretty decent and brings in good photos even though the colors are a bit over saturated. While the photo quality is good, it is not up to the mark of Gionee’s flagship phone the E7 which has a 16MP camera. This might be probably due to the fact that E7 comes with Snapdragon 800 Chipset.
The camera UI is unchanged from E7 and again not the best as the settings covers the viewfinder and you cannot see the changes you make in real time on the viewfinder. We hope Gionee fixes these issues with the KitKat update. The low light photos are really bad and there is lot of noise included.
Related Watching: Gionee Elife S5.5 Camera Review
Here are some of the photo samples from the phone.
Here is a video sample recorded at 1080p.
Battery Life:
The device comes with a 2300mAh battery and the battery performance is a bit low on this device. Although you can squeeze out a day of usage with the battery, if you love playing games and watching movies, the battery goes down pretty fast. There is an option to limit the CPU performance of Octa Core processor in the battery saving mode.
Verdict:
Overall, for a price of around Rs 22999 (currently selling for Rs 20000-21000), the device is a decent buy with great design, excellent build and display and an above average camera performance. With Android KitKat update coming soon, this device should be a good buy if you are ok with a not so great battery performance. You can also check out Micromax Canvas Knight which has similar specs and price range, but with Android 4.2.
