GADGET GIZMO REVIEW Gionee Elife E8

GADGET GIZMO REVIEW

Gionee Elife E8

Gionee launched the Elife E7 two years ago and it instantly impressed us with its camera capabilities. At that time, the E7 managed to deliver image quality at par with more expensive flagship smartphones. Now, Gionee has launched a successor -it's called the Elife E8 and is also meant for photography enthusiasts.

On paper, the Elife E8 has top-notch camera specifications. It boasts of a 24MP sensor with optical image stabilisation, phase detection autofocus, dual tone LED flash and 4k video recording support. In fact, you also get a dedicated shutter button on the phone.It can be used to call up the camera app, when pressed for a few seconds on the lock screen.

Thanks to all these features and the way Elife E7 had impressed us, we expected the E8 to be a fantastic camera smartphone. However, the E8 fails to impress in picture quality.Images from the rear camera suffered from visible noise when we zoomed-in on the phone's screen itself -a big letdown.

It was only when we selected ISO 100 manually in Pro mode that the noise issue was fixed to an extent. Low light images suffered from more noise. On the plus side, the images captured had great colours and good details in daylight. Also, we liked the updated interface, the focus speed as well as capture speed on the phone. However, the Samsung S6 (available at the same price) delivers much better camera performance.

Gionee has also updated its camera interface to take benefit of the camera. You get the standard HDR, panorama, night mode along with an Ultra Pixel mode (takes images in 5 times the reso lution ­ 12608 x 9456 pixels), Smart Scene mode (automatic changes settings as per scene), PicNote (for documents), face beauty , best photo, motion track, group shoot, motion blur, object removal, depth of field and a professional mode (access to all controls). In addition, you can also adjust settings for touch capture, use volume keys for capture or zoom as well as enable a countdown timer.

Looks and build quality are other strong suits of the phone. It has a gorgeous 6-inch amoled display with a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels -you get great contrast, superb black levels and excellent brightness. The metal body feels good to hold even though a part of the removable panel is plastic.Weighing 210 grams, the dual SIM phone does feel heavy to carry around in the pocket though.

On the rear is a fin gerprint sensor just under the camera module -in our us age the fingerprint sensor worked great 9 out of 10 times. It unlocked and woke up the device in stantly .

Performance is as expected from a flag ship device -the Helio X10 processor combined with 3GB RAM runs things butter-smooth and had no issues with any app or game we tried on the phone. You get 64GB internal storage and a microSD slot for expansion which is a welcome change from the non-expandable 16GB storage we are seeing in a lot of new devices. We did notice that the phone started to heat up after 15-20 minutes of continuous gaming. Battery life is over a day and half -good, considering the specifications and display .

As a camera focused smartphone, the Elife E8 does not live up to the promise (we'd prefer the Galaxy S6 any day).The steep price is a letdown too. That being said, the Gionee E8 does impress as a large screen phone that is loaded with features, offers good battery life in a great design. You can also look at the Nexus 6 that has a similar 6-inch amoled display , Snadragon 805, 3GB RAM, 13MP camera with OIS and a 3,220mAh battery and is now available for `29,999 (64GB storage). However, keep in mind that it has non expandable storage.

Karan.Bajaj@timesgroup.com