Gionee P7 Review: A Budget Smartphone

Gionee is one of the few Chinese companies in India those are selling their phones offline as well online. The offline marketing really helps Gionee to reach their phone in the reach of people’s those still not prefer to buy the mobile online. Gionee is known for its premium segment smartphone with great battery backup & big screen like Gionee Marathon m5 (review). One more thing the Gionee’s phones are easily available in the market unlike the Xiaomi, Coolpad and some other companies which are mostly available online and are often out of stock. The Gionee P7 price in India is Rs 9,999 and under 10k it going to stand against some most popular budget smartphones in India such as Xiaomi Redmi 3S, Redmi Note 3 &4, Moto G4 Play, Coolpad Note 3S, and Lenovo K6 Power.

Gionee P7 Design and Build

The design of Gionee P7 is not unique but looks attractive little bit due to its glossy panel. The Gionee P7 we got for review was gray in color from back side and edges, while the front side is complete in black. The phone completely has a good quality plastic body and glossy finished all around. The Glossy panel looks attractive but also prone to fingerprints. The back side is comprised of Camera, LED flash, Gionee’s Logo in a vertical symmetry and speaker grills at the bottom. The back cover is removable, under it back cover you will find SIM 1 + micrSD at lift side and SIM card 2 slots at the right side of the back. The removable 2300mAh battery is just placed under the SIM card slots. Gionee P7 has slightly curved edges which give it a well-rounded shape that makes it easy to hold. To protect the phone from scratches, Gionee has added a screen guard and silicon back cover inside the P7 Box.

Coming to its front side, it has three capacitive buttons below the display which aren’t backlit. The upper portion of the display uses the left side of the earpiece for the front camera & notification LED while the right side is for Light Sensor. The micro-USB port is placed at the bottom and the 3.5mm jack is at the top. For power button and volume rockers, they use its right side.

Gionee P7 Display Review

The 5.0-inch display has a resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels and 294 ppi. The color reproduction of the display is good but the viewing angles of this phone are average. The brightness level of the phone is good and we didn't find any difficulty while using it in direct sunlight. The phone uses HD display that can be a little downside of this phone because Redmi Note 4 at the same providing the FHD screen. Overall the display is good for day to day usage.

Gionee P7 Camera Review: Good Camera

Gionee P7 Camera has 8MP rear camera auto focus is very good and colors it captured are natural. The quality of images it captured are not so bad and also you can't expect much from a phone coming at this price range.  Overall the camera is good for general purpose usage but still, the detailing part is missing somewhere. The images captured in the low light have come with some noise. The P7 camera app has Pro mode that allows you to capture the images by adjusting the ISO, White balance, Focus, and Shutter. Beside manual mode, it offers different modes such as beauty mode, night, panorama, time-lapse, GIF, and HDR including live filters. About selfies, there is a 5MP camera and it is good to capture selfies in a good amount of light.

Sample Images

Gionee P7 Performance and Software

The Gionee P7 has an Amigo 3.2.0 UI on the top Android 6.0 Marshmallow. There is no app drawer and its shortcut setting panel access is same like iPhone by swiping from the bottom. The notification can access by swiping down from the top. After updating the software, we got a new panic button feature that triggers the emergency call by pressing the power button three times.

Under the hood of Gionee P7, the device is powered by MediaTek MT6735 1.3GHz Quad-core processor and Mali-T720 GPU coupled with 2GB RAM. For storage, it has 16 GB along dedicated microSD card slot to expand the memory up to 128GB. The smartphone can run all day to day apps easily but after opening 10-12 apps in the background like Facebook, Instagram and other apps the smartphone show some lag. Overall multitasking experience is average.

We played Asphalt 8 game on this phone and there is no lag on the phone while gaming but, yes, there is some heating issue during gameplay and camera usage. The gaming experience was not too much great but it is expectable. The device gives 16GB internal memory out of which the only 9Gb is available for users.  The device works very well in our basic usage such text, YouTube, calling and browsing.

Gionee P7 Battery life

The Gionee P7 battery is 2300mAh that gives us 4 hours and 55 minutes in our video loop test. If you are a moderate user then the phone can easily stand for a day. But if you are an extreme user then we advise you to carry your charger or power bank with you.