Gionee Elife S Plus

Starting at a price of Rs. 5,999, the S Plus comes in three colours, dark blue, gold, and white. It accommodates internal storage of 16GB which is expandable using a micro-SD card. The phone is available in both offline and online marketplaces.

While the Marathon series focussed on long battery life, Gionee has focussed on good design and aesthetics with the Elife series. The S Plus looks elegant and stylish, much like the HTC Desire phones, the difference being the capacitive buttons and a smaller earpiece.

At the front of the device above the screen display are the front-facing camera, the LED light and the earpiece. Below the display are the capacitive buttons are not backlit, which makes it challenging to use the phone in the dark.

The 3.5mm audio jack is placed at the top of the panel, and on the right side are the volume rocker buttons and the power button. The Type-C charging slot is at the bottom along with a microphone.

On the back side on top is the rear camera with an LED flash and at the bottom is located the speaker grille. The back panel can be removed, which opens to a non-removable 3,150mAh battery, two SIM card slots and a microSD card slot.

The Gionee Elife S Plus sports a 5.5-inch Amoled display. It has a screen resolution of 720 x 1,280 pixels and 267 ppi of pixel density, which is relatively low when compared to its rivals. The Corning Gorilla Glass v3.0 protects the display from minor scratches and cracks. The Capacitive touchscreen phone measures 7.5mm and weighs 158 grams.

The viewing angles are not satisfactory, and even the screen is quite reflective under direct sunlight. Even though the phone has a low pixel resolution, the display offers decent viewing angles and colour saturation. But does it still do justice to its price range? We don’t think so.

The pairing up of a MediaTek MT6753 SoC with 3GB of RAM is reason enough to know this phone will operate well in day-to-day functions. The phone does well in terms of web browsing, reading and viewing photos. When tested for gaming, the phone runs pretty smoothly then too, thanks to the Mali-T720MP3 GPU. However, we did notice that after a period of roughly 30 minutes, the device would start heating up.

We had a good experience with multitasking on this phone too. Even after having six to seven apps open in the background, the phone did not hang or lag. Amigo UI is responsive also, for the most part, at least.

The phone catches on to network pretty well, and the call clarity is good.

Just like the Marathon and the Elife series, the Gionee Elife SPlus has a 13MP primary camera with an F/2.0 aperture and an LED flash. The 13MP shooter on this device performs well in both day and low-light conditions. The daytime images are detailed and sharp. The colours reproduction is excellent, and there is no noise either.

However, the device doesn’t do so well in low-light conditions. The image tone is warmer, and there is a lot of grain and distortion.

For video recording, there is an anti-shaking feature helps in removing shakes. The front-facing camera is 5MP, and the images captured have beautiful detailing and accurate colours.

The camera has various shooting modes such as Night Mode, Magic Focus, Panorama, HDR and Ultra pixel. There is also a professional mode that provides control over settings such as Focus, Shutter Speed, White Balance, ISO and Exposure Value.

Nonetheless, the SPlus camera is a bit of a let down when compared to others like the OnePlus X and Moto X Play.

The device has a 3,150mAh battery and delivers roughly five hours of on-screen time. During our tests, we carried out various activities such as downloading apps and playing games, most of which required us to be connected to the internet. With multiple apps running in the background, we also browsed the web, made phone calls and used social media and messaging apps. The device lasted for around 36 hours, which is quite good.

The phone offers a Normal battery saving mode and an Extreme battery saving mode. The Normal mode lowers the brightness, changing the UI to black and decreases the sleep time of the display. The Extreme mode allows only four functions – the messaging, phone, contacts and the clock app to run. To sum it up, we can say that the battery life of the SPlus is better compared to devices like the OnePlus X and the Moto X Play.

The Gionee Elife S Plus is an excellent product with good configuration, decent battery backup and great looks. The performance of the device is also good, thanks to the optimised Amigo UI. Its strongest point is definitely its battery life, which gives it the upper hand over its OnePlus X and Moto X Play competitors.