At the Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona, Gionee announced their new flagship product, the Elife S7 in the S-series. The phone comes with 5.2-inch AMOLED display with 1920 x 1080 (Full HD) resolution and is powered by 64 bit 1.7GHz octa-core Mediatek MT6752 processor with 2GB of RAM. There is 16GB of storage, but no microSD card support. The phone runs on Android 5.0 Lollipop and the company’s first device with the latest Android version. There is also 2750mAh battery on the phone. The phone also supports 4G LTE in India.
Here is the detailed review of Gionee Elife S7.
Related Reading: Gionee Elife S7 Unboxing
Design and Build:
Design has been one of the key USPs of the S series from Gionee and the Elife S5.5 and S5.1 had great quality. The Elife S7 continues that feature and is a well build phone. The design looks great with the sides of the device sports a U frame with a metallic build which is aviation-grade aluminium magnesium alloy. The U shaped frame also gives good grip on the device. At 5.5 mm thick and 126.5gms weight, the phone feels amazing in hands and is terrific to use. The S7 is definitely a style statement for people who want their smartphones to look and feel great. While the S5.5 had a bump for the camera, the S7 has a flat back panel and both the front and rear panels are made of glass and protected with Corning Gorilla Glass 3.
The power and volume keys are placed on the right side along with 3.5mm audio jack, micro USB and speaker located at the bottom. The SIM tray is on the left side and it can accommodate dual SIM cards. The front panel has the 5.2 inch Full HD AMOLED display along with front camera, earpiece. The phone comes with on screen buttons for navigation.
Overall, the design and build quality of the device is top notch.
Display:
Gionee Elife S7 comes with a 5.7 inch Full HD (1080p) AMOLED display. The colours are bright, sharpness is good and contrast ratio is also perfect, typical stuff you would see on an AMOLED display. The viewing angles are also good and so is the sunlight readability. The touch response was also good and we did not have any issues. But having said that the display is prone to finger prints as it attracts them a lot and you would end up cleaning the display often.
There is also additional protection in the form of Corning Gorilla Glass 3. Overall, the quality of the display on Elife S7 is very good.
Software:
Gionee Elife S7 runs on Amigo UI 3 which is layered on top of Android 5.0 Lollipop, the latest from Google. Even though many phones which offer a custom UI on top of Android Lollipop, there isn’t much which looks and feels like Lollipop. When we reviewed Gionee’s mid range phones like the Elife S5.1, we noticed that the UI was laggy and was not responsive, but with Amigo UI 3.0, Gionee has fixed those issues and now the UI is better. The UI is more polished as well when compared to what we saw on other S series phones.
The notification center has a different implementation and it only comes with notifications and there are no quick toggles. The quick toggles or the control center can be activated by swiping from the bottom similar to iOS.
The Amigo UI on S7 has done with a complete make over and gives a decent feel as well. The UI offers some basic customizations and themes, but the choices are limited and there is no option to download themes. There is also widget support on S7. Another useful option in the Elife S7 is the Chameleon mode. As the name indicates, you can change the color of settings and other option in phone, by selecting any color using the camera. For example, you can easily open the Chameleon app and point it to any object like leaves or flowers and your settings will have a combination colors of these.
The Gionee Elife S7 also features smart gestures like double tap to wake and sleep, smart brightness, smart answer and more. You can also enable touch less wake up by air gestures which works well. You can also draw patterns on the display and launch apps from the display without turning it on.
The phone also comes with a system manager app which allows you to clean up cache, manage apps and also data traffic limit.
Overall, Gionee has done some good work with the UI and feels much better than previous S series phones.
Performance:
Gionee Elife S7 is powered by a 1.7GHz MediaTek MT6752 octa-core processor which is a 64 bit processor and is coupled with 2GB RAM. When we tested the phone, we never noticed any major lag or issues. While the overall performance is much better than what we saw on Elife S5.5, there were still minor hiccups which is not really an issue. In benchmark tests, we got 45958 on AnTuTu, 15807 on Quadrant and 62.6fps on Nenamark 2 which is in league with OnePlus One and Mi4. Watch: Gionee Elife S7 Benchmarks.
The phone comes with 16GB internal storage and 10GB is usable which is kind of disappointing as there is no micro SD expansion slot on this device similar to Elife S5.5 and S5.1. The call quality on the device was very good and we never encountered any issues, the speaker performance is also good especially when playing games.
The gaming experience on the device was very good with hardly any lag or frame drops. The 5.2 inch AMOLED Full HD display is a treat to play games. But having said that the phone does get heated up quickly as it is made of glass panel. The phone does support 4G LTE in India, but we couldn’t test it as there is no 4G LTE in our location.
Camera:
The phone features a 13MP rear camera with LED flash and a front 8MP camera for selfies and video calls. The camera features lots of modes and options including professional mode which allows you to manually control aspects like white balance, exposure, shutter speed, ISO and also focus. There is also magic focus mode where in you can change the focus after taking the photos. Overall, the interface of the camera is pretty good and offers lots of features and options.
We tested the camera in various light conditions and found the performance to be average. In daylight the performance was pretty decent although the colors looked slightly over saturated. The sharpness levels were lower and resulted in noise. The low light performance was also decent, but photos were noisy. While the camera performance was good, it will not beat the OnePlus One or the MI4 in the camera performance. There is also a 8MP front camera which is very good for selfies and quality of photos were good. The 1080p recording from the device was also good. Here are some of the samples taken with the camera.
Battery Life:
The phone comes with a 2700mAh battery and the performance was pretty decent. With average usage, we could easily sail through a day. We tested by using few social apps in the background along with regular calls and camera usage. We tested the phone with 3G SIM card.
The phone also comes with some useful options to get better battery life. You can enable normal mode or battery saver mode (extreme mode). The extreme mode turns the phone to use only basic functions like call and SMS, but can extend the battery life.
Verdict:
Gionee Elife S7 is officially priced Rs 24999 but it is now selling for around 22k. Elife S7 creates a big style statement with excellent design and build quality. The software is improved and the display is very good. But there are some issues with the Elife S7, especially the storage which is crippled at 16GB and offers no SD card slot. If you are looking for a stylish and slim phone, the Elife S7 is good device to buy. If not there are few other worthy competitors in the form of OnePlus One, Mi4 and also Honor 6.
