It’s getting difficult to tell budget phones apart. Although at ₹19,999, the Gionee A1 is more of a mid-ranger. The handset has the same design that affordable phones are wearing these days. The same metallic finish, the same colours, the same antenna lines, the same 2.5D glass on the front, etc. And like many others, including other phones from Gionee itself, the A1 is apparently a selfie oriented phone.
Be that as it may, Gionee is a company that knows what it’s doing. Long before the Chinese brigade that floods the market with phones today, Gionee came in and started working its way from the interiors to the larger metros. Gaining a firm foothold in smaller towns, Gionee then moved on to selfie phones catering to the major cities.
The A1 is a 5.5-inch phone but a little heavy because it has a 4,010mAh battery on the inside. Gionee has always believed in lots of battery power and has many long-playing battery phones in its portfolio.
Passible camera
The front camera at 16MP has more megapixels than the primary 13MP one. That’s the trend for selfie phones today. These have all of the usual big words — phase detection autofocus etc, but in the end it’s really just an average camera set, beaten a bit by the new Vivo V5 Plus and the Oppo F3 Plus.
The A1 is powered by an octa-core Mediatek Helio P10 processor with 4GB RAM, 64GB storage and a memory card slot for expansion. It’s a dual SIM phone with 4G and VoLTE support.
What’s unusual for less expensive phones today though, the A1 actually comes with Android Nougat out of the box.
Gionee’s new device is for all parasitical purposes an average and even mediocre smartphone. It’s perhaps a little more expensive than it should be.
(The article first appeared in The Hindu BusinessLine.)