First impressions: Gionee Elife E8

 Gionee Elife E8

Gionee Elife E8 is not built for one hand operation. The phablet is neither slim nor light and has a substantial weight of 210 grams. If you are not fond of big screen devices, Elife E8 is definitely not for you.

In terms of design, Gionee has not done something out of the league but has managed to give Elife E8 a premium look. The phablet has metal edges that houses all the buttons at right places. Surprisingly, Gionee has also added a dedicated physical camera button at the lower right edge of Elife E8, which is not a common sight these days. This will definitely please users who don’t want to miss a precious moment. The rear panel has a fingerprint sensor to unlock the smartphone right below the 24MP camera sensor. A large speaker grill is located at the bottom of the back panel.

Vibrant 6-inch QHD display

During our brief stint with the Gionee Elife E8, we found the 6-inch QHD Super AMOLED display simply gorgeous. It has a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels that gives a pixel count of 490ppi. We still need to evaluate the color reproduction and contrast levels in direct sunlight, but initial impressions of the display were quite impressive.

Feature rich 24MP camera

Camera is definitely the highlight of Gionee Elife E8. We took some shots from the 24MP rear camera and they turned out to be pretty good even in the low-light condition. We couldn’t test it outdoor but feel that it should do a decent job with features such as optical image stabilisation, ultra pixel mode, fast focus (which actually works) and 4K video recording. A dual-tone flash light is also provided and the front has an 8MP camera for selfies and video calling.

Capable hardware

Gionee Elife E8 is backed by a MediaTek’s high-end MT6795 Helio X10 octa-core clocked at 2 GHz. It is the same SoC we have earlier seen in HTC One M9 Plus. There is 3GB of RAM for multi-tasking. The smartphone responded well with whatever we tried during the time we spent with the device. However, we will talk about its overall performance during its review in the upcoming week. Elife E8 has dual-SIM connectivity and comes with 64GB inbuilt memory.

Android 5.1 Lollipop with Gionee's Amigo 3.1 UI

Gionee Elife E8 runs Android 5.1 Lollipop-based on company's personalised software skin Amigo 3.1. The latest version of Amigo UI looks exactly similar to the previous Amigo UI 2.0 we have seen on Elife S7. However, Gionee claims that the new UI is lighter and much better in performance than the previous version. Something we will test during the review. We also noticed that Gionee has added various Indian oriented themes to customize the look and feel, just like Xiaomi did with its MIUI.

Large 3250mAh battery

Gionee Elife E8 packs in a 3,520mAh battery unit whose performance we will evaluate with our standard benchmarking process. The phablet is also NFC-enabled.