With good features and aggressive pricing, Chinese manufacturers like Gionee have been able to give big brands a run for their money. In an industry like this, innovation is the key. We’ve seen premium brands push boundaries by introducing extreme high-end features, fancy designs and bezeless screens. Gionee has taken a safe approach with their new flagship, the A1 by focusing on a better front camera and a strong battery life. The phone also comes with Android’s latest Nougat operating system. It’s priced aggressively just under Rs. 20,000*. So does the Gionee A1 make for an interesting phone at that price point? There’s only one way to find out!
Design and build
There is nothing exceptional about the A1’s design but it manages to fulfill the basic requirements. The phone comes with a metal build all around and has a slim profile. Its back panel features a smooth matte finish and rounded edges that make it comfortable to hold. You even get a Gorilla Glass coating at the front, so it’s reasonably sturdy.
Gionee hasn’t put a lot of attention to the smaller details and that shows. The two antenna lines at back for example, look bad and add a very rigid feel to the otherwise smooth finish. That also goes for the speaker grill at the bottom. Adding to that, the glass finish at the front ends up being a big fingerprint magnet. These are of course small things.
Besides that, there are also a few odd things, like the Gionee logo at the back looks like a finger print sensor but it isn’t. It’s placed exactly below the camera and carries a similar housing, like on many other phones. We are so used to that design that for the first few times, we kept pressing the logo hoping that it will unlock the phone.
We’d still say that the design is good. Even with a 5.5-inch screen, the phone is usable in one hand. It doesn’t have a slim bezel like we’ve seen on other phones lately, but it is still pretty slim. Reaching the volume rocker keys and the standby button is very easy when using the phone in one hand. The home button at the front also doubles as the finger print sensor, and has a satisfying travel to it. The two buttons around it are capacitive. We had the black variant of the phone, which we prefer because it is subtle. You can also get the phone in Gold and Grey.
Camera
The A1 is all about selfies. There’s no doubt about that, since it comes with a 16MP front-facing camera equipped with an aperture of f2.0 and a front-facing flash. We really like the clarity and fine details. The A1’s camera managed to even capture the details in hair pretty well. That sort of clarity is hard to miss. Skin tones look pretty natural too. Photos clicked indoors looked vibrant for the most part. In a few cases they looked slightly over-exposed, but switching to HDR helped maintain good contrast.
Focusing by the front camera happens quickly in decent lighting. In backlit scenarios though, it takes time and doesn’t always get it right. We’re not complaining though, because we’ve seen most smartphones produce poorer results in such situations. Changes made by the Beauty mode on the camera aren’t very subtle and quite often the image looks unnatural and in a few cases, horrifying.
The rear camera is also pretty good at 13MP. It has a similar aperture value and dual tone flash, but lacks image stabilization. Video recording is also limited to full HD. Being a camera phone, we were expecting good images but the outcome is slightly disappointing. Colors looked too saturated, which made the images gaudy. There is no consistency with the focusing. However, with close-up macro shots, it performed really well. In most cases, it was also the lack of image stabilization that resulted in blurry images. There is a Professional shooting mode on the camera, which helps in focusing better. We weren’t able to bring down the colours though.
Besides that, the camera app is loaded with a whole range of features. There are 12 different modes to choose from. Other features like card scanner, QR code reader and language translator are all built into the camera app. It’s great because you don’t have to install separate apps for these. There are also a whole range of colorful filters to play around with.
Having all those features is good, but that also makes the camera app very sluggish. We noticed stuttering while using both cameras. It only gets worse when you’re using the Professional mode or any of the other filters for the rear camera. The dials have a very noticeable lag to them. Besides that, the phone also takes plenty of time to process images. With the resolution set to high, we had to wait almost for a second before the photo showed up in the Gallery. We personally didn’t like the interface of the camera either. It looks like a tackier version of the one seen on iOS.
Amigo interface
The Gionee A1 comes with Android 7 (Nougat) layered with their proprietary Amigo UI. We aren’t big fans of the UI because it’s heavy and there’s plenty of bloatware included in form of games and unnecessary tools like theme finder. There are a bunch of third-party apps included as well. As a result, it feels very sluggish and unresponsive. You notice it the minute you start scrolling through the app drawer.
The notification drawer is kept separate from the control panel. The quick settings panel has to be scrolled from the bottom, another design element borrowed from iOS. The Settings app is a little confusing to get around the first time. Here you’ll also find a separate Features tab, which carries quick tutorials for features of Android Nougat and Amigo. Some examples include the Split-screen feature, Battery manager and Quick Charging. A big disappointment is the omission of Google Assistant.
For us, it was the poor implementation of features that made the experience less than ideal. For example, on the homescreen you can add an Edge bar, which carries shortcuts to certain apps of your choice. It can be scrolled-in from either of sides of the screen, with the help of the home button. It sounds good but it kept interrupting whenever we pressed the home button. Even setting a fingerprint means having to go through three steps of authentication which puts you off. The most annoying thing about the interface though is the lock screen. It presents you with a list of random news stories in the form of pictorial cards. It’s difficult to disable this feature.
The only thing we ended up liking are the quick gestures. You can answer calls by simply placing the phone on ear or switch off the alarm by simply flipping the phone. You can also use a whole range of lockscreen gestures to get quick access to apps or perform certain functions. The fingerprint sensor is also pretty snappy and unlocks almost immediately after you place your thumb on it.
Specifications
| Processor |
MediaTek 6755 octa-core (2.0GHz) |
| Ram |
4GB |
| Storage |
64GB internal, Expandable to 256GB (SIM 2) |
| Battery |
4,010 mAH |
| Display |
5.5-inch (Full HD) |
| Camera |
13MP Rear camera; 16MP Front camera |
| Operating system |
Android 7 (Nougat) |
| Interface |
Amigo 4.0 |
| SIM |
Dual SIM (Nano SIM/ Micro SIM) |
| Network |
GSM/HSPA/LTE |
Performance
The Gionee A1 comes with a 4,010 mAh battery which is pretty impressive. For its size, it has about twice the capacity compared to other phones. There is support for fast charging too. Gionee claims that the phone charges completely in about two hours, but you have to use the charger provided in-the-box. We would’ve liked a USB Type-C port too. There is also an Extreme mode included which helps save battery. Gionee claims it can run for 400 hours on a single charge.
You get a MediaTek 6755 octa-core processor running alongside 4GB of RAM, which might sound good on paper, but was a letdown when it came to the actual performance. We noticed the phone stuttering, even while scrolling through Facebook and Instagram feeds. Images take more time to load in both apps. There is a noticeable performance drop, when more apps are loaded in the background. Apps take more time to open and close. Somewhat intensive games such as Super Mario Run work fine, but heavy games likes Asphalt 8: Airborne and N.O.V.A Legacy showed signs of stuttering. They are still playable, but to get the best performance out of them, you need to close apps running in the background.
One area where the A1 exceeded our expectations is the screen. It’s bright and looks very lively. The colour temperature on the cooler side, but you can adjust that from the settings. Brightness levels are also good for outdoors. It’s only the viewing angles where the Gionee A1 falls short. The built-in speakers are loud but sound very shallow. The much needed punch is missing so the experience while playing music isn’t very enjoyable. They’re still decent enough for playing games or watching YouTube videos.
We ran a couple of benchmarks and got the following scores
The scores are pretty low. In AnTuTu, the phone managed to get 49,773. We’ve seen other phone in the same price range perform much better. With GFX OpenGL’s, low-level test, the smartphone was able to run 1080p videos at 13FPS, which is pretty low. 3D Mark score was decent at 400. Even with the low scores, the Gionee A1 surprisingly offers a decent media performance.
Design and build
The Gionee’s attempts at making the A1 look premium haven’t turned out as expected. The overall design looks good, but it’s the inconsistency with smaller details that is off-putting. What we like is that it is comfortable to hold and is reasonably sturdy, thanks to the metal build and the Gorilla Glass coating at the front.
6.5/10
Features
The Gionee A1 comes with a pretty decent set of features. It includes a MediaTek 6755 processor and 4GB of RAM. There is also 64GB of internal storage with an expandability option of 256GB. The two USPs though are the 16MP front camera and the 4,010 mAh battery. The rear camera has a 13MP sensor.
You also get dual SIM with 4G and LTE support. For media, you get a 5.5-inch full HD screen and dual speakers at the bottom.The Gionee A1 comes with Android 7 (Nougat) layered with Amigo UI. It’s heavy and filled with bloatware. Most of the customizable features don’t work well and Google Assistant doesn’t make the cut.
7.0/10
Even with a better hardware, the performance is poor. Social media apps like Facebook and Instagram take time to refresh and opening multiple tasks brings in a noticeable lag to the entire interface. Opening and closing apps doesn’t happen very smoothly. There is very prominent framing when using the camera app. Adding more filters adds to the performance hit.
Media performance is decent. Full HD videos and moderate games run smoothly. High-end games are also playable, but there is some stuttering. The screen offers good brightness levels and vibrant colours. It makes media performance enjoyable. The speakers are bad and have a very shallow output.
6.0/10
Verdict
Gionee A1 has its USP in place. It can in fact take great selfies and offers a good battery life. However, there are plenty of other things about the phone that rank below average for us. The tacky interface and the slow performance are pretty hard to ignore. This makes it pretty hard for us to recommend the Gionee A1, when there are plenty of phones in the market that offer a much more streamlined performance around the same price. On the flip side though, if your priority are selfies and battery life, then by all means, get the Gionee A1.
6.5/10
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