The burgeoning Indian smartphone market has attracted attention of many. While many Indian mobile companies have cropped up in the past few years, very few Chinese OEMs – whom these Indian companies source the devices from – have tried venturing by themselves in the world’s second largest telecom market. Gionee is one of them. Gionee started as an original equipment manufacturer to few India-based mobile phone companies but sensing the opportunity in the Indian market decided to bring the devices under their own brand. They have got a decent range of phones for Indian consumers but this is the first time, the company is making a splash with its flagship device – Elife E6.
The phone was announced last month and going by the marketing splurge seen on television and other mediums, Gionee is banking the device to be a success. But is it worth it? We take a look.
We can label E6 as one of the better built Android phones around. With a unibody design, it certainly beats some of the best-selling Android devices from gobally renowned brands in the 30k range. The retail packaging of E6 comes with two screen guards and a flip cover, earphones, USB cable and a power adapter.
The phone is just 7.9mm thin and boasts a full HD IPS 5-inch display with Gorilla Glass 3 and One Glass Solution (OGS). The display resolution results in higher pixel density of 441ppi and offers a good picture quality along with great viewing angles. The E6 runs on Android 4.2.1, however, comes with a pre-installed skin that we can say is somewhat inspired from the iOS. Like the iOS interface and unlike Android, there is no app drawer. For instance, swiping up will unlock the device and will reveal all the apps installed, just like you have it on the iOS. Uninstalled an app works the same way – long press an app to wobble and uninstall them. However, to give a conventional Android feel, you can install any third party launcher that will bring back the app drawer and widget support back to the device. The E6 has a power button at the top and a volume button on the left. The speakers are at the bottom of the panel with a micro USB port in the center.
The E6’s unibody holds inside a Mediatek 6589T quad-core CPU running at 1.5GHz and the Power VR SGX GPU. Although we were satisfied with the overall performance of the device, you’ll find a bit of lag occasionally. E6 does not have any expandable memory card slot but the phone tries to compensate the lack of expandable storage with 32GB of internal memory, giving ample room to store all your multimedia content as well as install large capacity apps and games. The E6 2000 mAh battery lasts pretty much more than a day on 3G network and Wi-Fi access.
On the network and calling front, the phone does a good job. The call quality, network quality are both excellent. One of the gripe that we have with Gionee is that it bundles some apps with the phone like the NQ mobile security, UC Browser, some games, and more, that cannot be uninstalled. Understandably, these are done to make the lives of the consumers easier but we wished Gionee would give an option to uninstall (or at least hide or disable them if the user don’t want to use them).
On the imaging front, the E6 features a 13-megapixel rear camera and 5-megapixel front camera. The camera fares well in decently lit areas but gives below par performance in low light situations. The macro shots turn out to be pretty good and to spruce up the images, the phone comes with features like Face beauty, Panorama(Horizontal & Vertical), Eraser, Face detection, Geo-tagging, Touch focus, 99 snaps in one click, MAV, Gesture Shot, Smile Shot.
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| Gionee Elife E6 Sample Shots |
You can check out the same images on our Flickr set.
The E6 currently retails for Rs.20,999 and given the fact that there are options for consumers in the form of Nexus 4, Samsung Galaxy S4 mini and more, it could be a tough sell for the company. We give full marks to Gionee for the design and build quality of E6, however, with the mediocre performance it misses our 5 star rating.
Rating: 
Pros: Design, Full HD Display
Cons: Average Camera
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