Gionee Pioneer P5L

Pros:

• The sound quality is impressive.
• It is light to hold and looks very stylish.

Cons:

• It has poor battery backup.
• It has frequent heating issues.
• It has only 1GB RAM.
• The internet is slow while browsing.
• It tends to hang.

The P5L starts at a price of Rs. 5,199 and is the only Gionee phone to be available in 6 colour variants – Red, White, Black, Blue, Yellow and Gold. The phone has an internal storage of 16GB and can be expanded up to 128GB via a micro-SD card. The P5L uses Android 5.0 Lollipop and runs on a 1.3GHz quad-core processor with 1GB RAM.

The P5L sizes up to 143.5mm x 72mm x 8.3mm for its length, breadth and height. It also weighs only 146g, which is quite light in the palms. The display inside your Gionee Pioneer P5L smartphone uses LCD IPS technology, and the screen comes with a resolution of 720 x 1280px (HD) for a screen diagonal of 5″ inches. Under the screen, the bottom has three capacitive buttons – home, back and recent. There is no fingerprint scanner on this phone.

The top of the screen has a front-facing 5MP camera, the earpiece and a proximity sensor. The right side of the plastic panel has the volume rocker buttons and the power button. On the back side is the rear 8MP camera with LED flash, and the Gionee company branding in the middle. At the top of the panel, there is the 3.5mm audio jack and the speaker grille at the bottom.

Gionee Pioneer P5L has a 4.7 inch TFT LCD,  with an 854 x 480 pixels screen resolution and 208PPI pixel density. The screen is quite reflective in normal daylight, let alone using it on an extremely sunny day. Just like the other Gionee phones, the Pioneer P5L displays all the settings options by dragging screen from the bottom to the top.

The Gionee Pioneer P5L mobile phone has a combination of one MediaTek MT6735 processor and one ARM Cortex-A53 Quad-Core with a 1.3 GHz clock speed. There have been some issues in terms of performance such as heating up of the device and lagging of the phone in case too many applications are open.

As for the graphics part, the Gionee Pioneer P5L uses the ARM Mali-T720 graphics card. The Gionee Pioneer P5L also works with the following 4G (LTE) networks and frequencies: B3 (1800), B40 (TDD 2300).

The device has two cameras – a front-facing 5MP camera and an 8MP rear camera. The front camera does a decent job at clicking selfies, whereas the rear camera has an LED flash with an f/2.4 aperture setting. A CMOS image sensor powers the 8 MP camera CMOS image sensor supporting a resolution of 3264 x 2448 Pixels and the front snapper.

Some other features that the camera includes are Touch focus, Face detection, continuous shooting mode,  Digital zoom, Exposure compensation, HDR, Geotagging, White balance settings, Panorama, ISO settings and Scene mode.

The Gionee Pioneer P5L has a removable battery which is Li-Ion type with a full charge capacity of 2300 mAh. After testing, we found out that the battery drains quite quickly, and the phone would hang up if we tried multitasking. The phone would immediately restart which alone would drain the battery.

The Gionee Pioneer P5L faces direct competition from Panasonic Eluga Icon and Coolpad Note 3 which offer bigger screen size, higher battery capacity and better camera in a similar price range.