Gionee has been increasing its smartphone portfolio very shrewdly in India. What we meant is that contrasting some of the other Chinese smartphone companies, Gionee smartphones are not limited to a single price segment.
The ‘S’ series is Gionee’s premium smartphone series, and the Gionee S6 was launched at the beginning of this year. Now the company has launched an upgraded Gionee S6s smartphone and claims that its biggest highlight is the “selfie flash.” The company stated that its main aim of this new product is to target the young group of buyers between the ages of 18 to 25.
Although along with the unibody metal build and a good under the hood dexterities, will the new Gionee S6s perform better than the competitor smartphones with the same price segment? Let’s find out in our Gionee S6s review.
Gionee S6s reviews – Design and Built
Our first Gionee S6s reviews are regarding the design and build of the smartphone. The unibody design Gionee S6s will give you a brawny feeling. The metal sides offer pretty good grip, though, at 166 grams, this smartphone is slightly weighty for its size.
The front is ruled by a 5.5-inch 2.5D curved display that paired with Corning Gorilla Glass finish, while the back is all metal. A gold lining lopes around the corners at the rear of the smartphone that gives it a premium feel. The device as seen in many other smartphones have three capacitive buttons for Home, Back, and Recent. The front camera with LED flash is housed on the top of the display.
The back panel has the main camera along with an LED flash and right below the camera is the fingerprint scanner. Gionee’s new emblem is housed underneath the fingerprint scanner. A speaker grill is housed at the bottom along with the company branding. The right panel has the power and volume rocker keys whereas the left features the hybrid SIM slot. The bottom houses the usual Micro-USB charging slot and a 3.5mm audio jack. At 8.15mm thickness, this handset is certainly not the slimmest phone available in the market but when using it doesn’t feel awkwardly thick.
However, it is to be noted that is the branding was removed from the back; the S6 could be easily be mistaken for the smartphone launched by Huawei, LeEco, or Oppo. With metal unibody, the back panel of some smartphones look comparable in lots of aspects. For example, the lines at the top and bottom of the smartphone and the round fingerprint scanner and its placement below the camera look very familiar. Gionee launched the S6s in two color variants Latte Gold and Mocha Gold in the country.
The 5.5-inch full HD display is sharp and bright. The sunlight legibility of the S6s smartphone is quite impressive. Besides the viewing angles were also not bad. Gionee packs the smartphone in an in-cell IPS display with decent back levels. Playing games and watching movies on the smartphone is a delight with no discomfort.
Taken as a whole, the Gionee S6s scores quite well regarding design and build. Although, the corners of the Smartphone could have been more rounded for better use.
Gionee S6s reviews: Specifications and Software.
Next, Gionee S6s reviews are of its specifications and software. The Gionee S6s sports a 5.5-inch full HD (1080×1920 pixels) screen accompanied by Corning Gorilla Glass. The company has put a 2.5D curved glass that has been very popular on many smartphones recently. The dual-SIM S6s runs on the Gionee’s Amigo 3.2 based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
The Gionee S6s is powered by a 1.3GHz octa-core MediaTek MT6753 SoC, paired with 3GB RAM; it should be noted that Gionee has been one of the smartphone brands that has been steadily using MediaTek chipsets. To which the Gionee responded that the MediaTek is capable of delivering what the company wanted its phones to do and that is sufficient to go with the SoCs.
The smartphone features a 13-megapixel autofocus primary camera along with Sony IMX 258 sensor, an f/2.0 aperture, and a LED flash. For the front camera, it has an 8-megapixel fixed-focus selfie camera also with a LED flash. The front camera features anf/2.2 aperture and a 5P lens. Moreover, the front camera also sports screen flash support. It comes with an onboard storage capacity of 32GB and offers a hybrid dual-SIM card slot that can further expand the storage up to 128GB.
For connectivity, the S6s offers 4G VoLTE, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, 3.5mm audio jack, and Micro-USB. The handset packs a 3150mAh non-removable battery, and houses a fingerprint sensor on the back panel. The S6s come with a regular Micro-USB slot which means there is no USB Type-C connectivity.
The S6s runs on the Gionee’s own Amigo 3.2 custom ROM based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow. There are some new visual effects noted that were not there in previous models. Users have the option to arrange the apps on the home screens with two new options- Cleanup, that clears the top or bottom of the home screen for new apps, and Arrange, which helps the users assemble the installed apps across various window panes.
Like before, there are no app drawers, and all the apps are spread across the home screens. Many Chinese smartphone companies have pitched down there custom Android version; that means there are less pre-loaded apps. However this is not the case with Gionee S6s, the handset comes with several pre-loaded apps. To name a few there is Hotoday, Gionee Xender, Mobile anti-theft app, Compass, System Manager, G Store, and Mood Wallpaper.
The software on the smartphone houses a lot of features like Fake Calls, Theme Park, Super Screenshot tool, and extreme battery mode setting.
On the software front, the S6s surely scores better than the Marathon M5 Plus that runs on Amigo 3.1 on top of Android 5.1 Lollipop. Though the biggest disappointment regarding software is the many pre-loaded apps and more importantly the fact that they cannot be removed.
Gionee S6s reviews: Performance
There are no lags during multi-tasking or any serious performance-related issues in regular use. It seems like the company has dropped some frames. Also, the phone slightly heated up during long gaming sessions, but it wasn’t something that would make the phone uncomfortable to hold.
Voice calls on the smartphone are clear, and there are no call drops. 4G connectivity too had no issues, as well.
Perform of the Gionee S6s is decent and can handle almost anything you through at it. The Quadrant gave it a score of 21,585, the AnTuTu benchmark test gave it a 38,208, on the other hand; GFXbench gave it 13fps in the T-Rex test.
The music app offers plenty of tweaking options. The music quality from the speakers was also decent, and it was able to handle loud music without any difficulty. Though, the speakers are not ideal for watching long movie-watching sessions. The bundled earphones are a good choice, which delivers better performance with good bass levels.
The primary camera of 13-megapixels comes with a Sony sensor, and it clicks decent shots with good details and color accuracy. However, there was some lack of detailing when you crop or zoom the images. The edges also lack detail. The low-light shots quality was, however, surprising. The low-light images were better than the Marathon M5 Plus.
One of the biggest highlights of Gionee S6s is its secondary camera. The 8-megapixel fixed-focus selfie camera with its flash and an f/2.2 aperture with a 5P lens. It takes some great selfies with decent color accuracy if the shots are taken in well-lit conditions. Unfortunately, indoor settings with low lighting have a different setting. Even with the front flash and the screen flash the pictures are up to the mark. The flash works effectively only in certain conditions.
The Gionee camera app is impressive. There are so many options including Slow motion, Macro, Panorama, HDR, Text recognition, Ultra pixel, Smart scene, PicNote, Mood photo, GIF, and smart scan. The app offers additional settings as well, such as Scene mode, White Balance, and Exposure.
Gionee S6s reviews – Battery Life
The Gionee S6s smartphone comes with a 3150mAh non-removal battery. In the video loop tests, it lasted for 13 hours and 10 minutes, which is quite good. In normal use, the S6s can last for over a day. Plus, the smartphone took only 2 hours to get fully charged from zero, even without the fast charging support.
Gionee S6s reviews – Final words
Gionee S6s price in India is Rs. 17,999 and seeing that, the Gionee S6s is a decent package. While the company claimed S6s to be the best selfie smartphone in the market, it is not that impressed with the low light front camera. performance. However, the overall performance of the smartphone is satisfactory, with no big issues that would cause inconvenience in normal usage.
Seeing that there are many smartphones at the same price of Rs. 15000 and comes with exact specifications that Gionee is offering, Gionee’s market position is doubtful. Though slightly lowering the price of the product might be a big help to the company.
