Gionee A1 Review: A Great Selfie Camera with Good Overall Performance

Gionee is one of the well-known names in the Indian market which, has product portfolio spread across several price segments. The new offering from the company is Gionee A1 tapping selfie-obsessed consumers.

Build and feel

As the metal is becoming more popular due to durability and premium looks, the phone also uses A6000 aircraft-grade material to build the smartphone. It feels sturdy and premium while holding the device in hands. The front is dominated by glass and has a fingerprint sensor embedded in the home button placed below the screen.

In terms of design, it resembles the looks to various current phones available in the market. It carries 183 grams of weight making it a but heavy. But you can use the device even with the single hand, thanks to smart dimensions of the body.

The FHD Screen

Gionee A1 comes with a 5.5-inch full-HD (1080x1920 pixels) AMOLED display producing rich colors and the good amount of brightness. In this price range, it holds one of the best screens that lets you enjoy games and videos. The blacks are quite rich and text looks crisp, with wide viewing angles it allows you to share the screen with your friends and family. The screen is protected by Corning gorilla glass to protect the screen from scratches but it works like a magnet to fingerprints.

Front camera to click amazing selfies

The phone is manufactured for selfie-obsessed users thus it has 16 MP camera at the front with LED flash. It captures beautiful images in with vibrant colors and details. As the phone is being heavily promoted as selfie phone, so the camera app offers various filters to enhance the selfies. However using filters like ‘Beautify’ the color tone looks artificial. The daylight shots are amazing, and low light shots are also good however a little noise can be seen in limited light conditions.

The rear 13 MP camera has f2.0 aperture and uses a Sony IMX258 sensor. It clicks images with accurate colors but sometimes looks oversaturated. Both, daylight and low light condition shots are good. But motion blur can be seen when you see them at full size. The camera app offers various modes including night, professional, time-lapse, slow-motion, smart scene, and GIF.

Overall both cameras are good to capture beautiful images.

Performance

Gionee A1 comes at mid-price but its performance is not compromised. The phone packs octa-core processor combined with 4 GB of RAM making the device powerful. I installed games like Asphalt 8: Airborne, WWE, Mortal Combat and NFS. There was no frame rate drop while paying any one of the games. Even while switching between them, I didn't see any performance lag. The only issue is heating with the phone while playing a game for about 30 minutes it starts heating and with high graphics intensive games, it becomes uncomfortable to hold.

The fingerprint sensor is quite fast and accurate. I don't remember even a single moment when it didn't recognize my fingers. The speakers of the phone come with MaxxAudio enhancement which produces loud sound and clear sound.

Battery

The mobile has 4010 mAh battery and supports fast charging. It can be charged 40% in only 20 minutes. Though it's not as much fast as other Type C devices, but it comes handy when you are in hurry. Fully charged battery can last for more than a day with moderate usage, net surfing, videos, games, music etc. And in our video loop test, it lasted for 5 hours 27 minutes.