Gionee A1 Mobile Features, Price, Full Specifications

Gionee A1 Mobile Features

At a price of Rs. 19,999, the Gionee A1 can be considered as a good overall smartphone that is ready to take on the competition in offline space. The phone comes with two good quality cameras, especially the front 16-megapixel selfie camera. Also, the big 4010mAh battery doesn’t disappoint at all.

About the performance, the phone does work well with moderate multitasking but then heavy duty tasks will be an issue. Having said that consumer’s get 4GB RAM with 64GB of internal storage along with excellent battery and good cameras. If Gionee goes aggressive with Gionee A1 Mobile in an offline retail market then this phone could be a Champion device for them.

1. Design & Build

The design of Gionee A1 Mobile seems inspired from company’s own S6 Pro. The front of the phone gets a slightly curved 2.5D glass, which adds to the design and was missing from S6 Pro. Other than that it boasts of a unibody metal construction. The handset comes in three color options Gray, Black and Gold.

Up front, the Gionee A1 Mobile features a 5.5-inch full-HD (1080p) 2.5D display. Since we got the Golden color review unit, the front of handset gets white bezels all around the display and there is one physical rounded rectangle Home key is at the bottom of it. The Home key is clickable and integrates fingerprint sensor. The other two capacitive touch buttons (Recent and Back) are marked with a tiny gray dot but are not backlit.

The back of Gionee A1 Mobile is all metal with brushed metallic color (Gold color for us). Unlike the glossy front display, the back doesn’t attract fingerprints or smudges easily because of a matte finish. The primary 13-megapixel Sony IMX 258 sensor cameras sit right in the top center of the back, and the dual-colour LED flash sits right below of it.

Gionee’s smiley-like logo is also present below the LED flash, and like us you might also mistake it for the fingerprint sensor but it’s not and fingerprint sensor is at the front only.

The top edge features a 3.5mm headphone jack, whereas the bottom edge features a micro-USB port sandwiched between two loudspeaker grills, out of which the right grill hides the loudspeaker inside while left grill has the primary microphone. The handset supports ‘Ultra-fast’ charging with company’s own 18W charger bundled in the retail box and USB-OTG support.

2. Display

The Gionee A1 Mobile features a 5.5-inch full-HD (1080 x 1920 pixels) 2.5D glass display with a pixel density of 401ppi. We found the display brightness levels to be quite good. The viewing angles and display visibility for both outdoors and indoors were sufficient. The slight glossiness adds to reflection and attracts fingerprints/ smudges easily.

We did have slight issues because of that under bright sunlight conditions; however, there is no problem with display touch accuracy and touch responsiveness.

Talking about the color reproduction, the display is quite vibrant but colors do appear a little over-saturated. Gionee has put in 2-3 nifty settings in Display, which can mainly adjust the color tone of the display (Neutral, Cool, and Warm), font style and font size. The color temperature setting can be found in Display> LCD effect. Overall, we found the display of Gionee A1 to be good for its price.

3. Performance

The Gionee A1 Mobile is powered by an octa-core 2.0GHz MediaTek Helio P10 MT6755 processor coupled with GPU and 4GB of RAM. The internal storage on the device is 64GB but users will only get about 52GB of free/ user available storage space on the first boot, because of access amount of pre-loaded bloatware from Gionee.

The hybrid SIM tray sits on the left edge and users can expand the storage via microSD card (up to 256GB). The handset also supports USB OTG for additional external storage. We didn’t have any issue with OTG support and it worked great.

In our benchmark testing, the Gionee A1 Mobile scored less than 50000 (49923) which isn’t great for comparison with other smartphones in this price bracket online, but an of course offline market is different and there it can be considered as a decent score. About the GeekBench Multi-Core results, Gionee A1 scored 2874 in multi-core test and the score of the single core was 727, which again by any standard is quite average for a smartphone at this price.

In real life, the performance of A1 was little contradictory to benchmark results and the phone did surprise us with smooth multitasking. The octa-core Helio P10 with 4GB RAM works great with any kind of normal day-to-day tasks. Coming to our multi-browser usage test, we didn’t have any issue here as well.

Switching between different browsers or tabs within was smooth, however, the phone lags with heavy apps like Lightroom. The other little issue of the processor is that it dissipates heat a lot while heavy duty tasks like good graphic rendering gaming, data transfer over Share it or when you navigate (Google Maps) for a long time.

4. Primary Camera

The Gionee A1 Mobile features a 13-megapixel Sony IMX 258f/2.0 camera sensor with contrast detection autofocus, which is capable of shooting up to 1080p (full-HD) videos at 30fps.

In our test, the rear 13-megapixel Sony sensor performed decent, especially in daylight. The shots usually came out sharp and had an adequate amount of detailing, although colors felt a bit over-saturated. The HDR shots had a bit better color reproduction and less saturation. Even in our lab test, the center and edge sharpness in perfectly lit conditions were crisp, and it also retained fibers detailing.

Wish Gionee would have added OIS (optical image stabilization), then the results would have been more consistent. About the low-light performance, the shots were fairly average but the consistency was an issue. Most shots were smudgy and lacked detailing. In our standard lab test, the extremely low-light shots had more noise but the center sharpness was fine. The sensor could not capture detailing or retain fibers.

The stock camera app on Gionee A1 packs quite a few nifty features. Mainly the phone is targeted for selfies, so features like ‘Face beauty’ mode allows you to use skin smoothening, whitening, slimming and eye Enlarge feature. There are 8 live filters which work with the rear as well as A front camera. Other than that ‘Prodessional’ mode, Time-lapse’, ‘Slow motion’, ‘GiF’ and ‘Translation’ features come in handy.

Overall, the rear 13-megapixel camera on Gionee A1 is a fair deal if you’ll be mostly shooting in daylight, otherwise, there are quite a few other camera phones available around same price bracket, which can do a better job. We recently reviewed Nubia Z11 mini S and Moto G5 Plus, both come with great primary cameras.

5. Secondary Camera

The Gionee A1 Mobile boasts of a high-resolution 16-megapixel front-facing camera with physical LED flash and f/2.0 aperture. The only unfortunate part is the ability to record videos up to 720p only.

The stock camera app by default shoots in auto mode and a swipe right gets you to the ‘Face beauty mode in which you can use skin smoothening, whitening, slimming and eye Enlarge feature. There are 8 live filters for easy shooting. The other good features for the front camera are the ability to shoot GIFs directly, create a Time-Lapse front facing video and a smart scene mode.

The mood photo option clicks square photos and puts them in a card for you as soon as you click and then in that you can ‘Write down your mood’, ‘Add location’ with a date along with few pre-selected editing filters as an option. Rest all other features are limited to the rear camera.

In our test, we found the front selfie camera on A1 to be quite impressive. Daylight selfies with the front camera were sharp and kept subject absolutely in focus which is very important in a selfie to keep the subject on priority. We found the overall exposure to be well-balanced and the camera captured detailing perfectly.

The low-light shots were quite decent too although edge sharpness and the detailing took a little back seat there. What is seriously good is the Selfie flash, and results taken with the flash on like like a torch or otherwise, don’t look artificially processed. In particularly dark conditions we found it to be quite handy. So overall, selfie lovers will be mostly happy with the Gionee A1’s front camera results and we categorized this device in one of the over-the-top great selfie camera smartphones.

6. Software & UI

The Gionee A1 runs company’s own Amigo OS 4.0 based on latest Android 7.0 Nougat. The company specified internal storage is 64GB but then Gionee’s preloaded bloatware with Amigo occupies about a little over 12GB, hence users are left with around 52GB of free space on first boot, which although is sufficient, but we would have liked a little lesser bloatware anyhow.

The A1 supports microSD card expandability up to additional 256GB, but with hybrid SIM slot functionality. It also supports USB-OTG for external storage/ pen-drive.

The Amigo OS of Gionee this time around with version 4.0 is more refined. It looks cleaner and the app icons etc. now have a minimalist design. The notification drop down is similar to Android, however, the quick settings menu need to be swiped up from the bottom. One issue that we had with the notifications was that you these are not visible on the lock screen, something similar to Honor’s EMUI. So unless you unlock the device, you would not be able to see any kind of notifications or do a swipe up to get to the quick settings menu.

So in short, you’ll need to swipe down for notifications and swipe up for quick settings.

Also, like many Chinese UIs, the Amigo OS too keeps all apps on home screen, means there is no app drawer like stock Android. If you need an app drawer, you can install Google Now Launcher or Nova. Other than that, you’ll find quite a few themes or wallpapers through ‘Theme Park’ and ‘Mood Wallpaper’ apps.

7. Battery Life

The Gionee A1 packs a 4010mAh non-removable Lithium-Ion battery. The charging port is standard micro-USB and Gionee ships in an 18W ultra fast charging power adapter for fast charging the big battery.

In our test of Ultrafast charging from Gionee’s own 18W charger, the battery percentage went from 0 to 15 in just 10 minutes and then to 42% in just 30 minutes. The full charging (100%) took a little less than 2 hours (about 1 hour 56 minutes). However, the phone heats quite a bit during ultra fast charging.

About the battery lifetime, the Gionee A1 Mobile lasted for about 12 hours 42 minutes in our video loop test. To understand how our video loop test works, the procedure involves a full-HD (1080p) movie playback on a loop in VLC with 50% volume through headphones, 100% screen brightness, and Wi-Fi enabled. We also ran PCMark battery benchmark (2.0) and result timing was 10 hours 17 minutes.

So, what we feel about the Gionee A1’s battery?

The battery on Gionee A1 can easily last one full day without any issue. Our usage and rigorous battery testing also got best battery time out of it. Our usage pattern involved average to heavy usage with a good amount of Calls, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, navigation, music & video streaming, and still, the battery didn’t need charging in one day.

usage pattern remained same throughout our review time and we used two SIM cards along with multiple email accounts, 5-6 social media apps, 1-2 hours of navigation and music streaming every day.

So if you are user similar to us then you will not face any issue with battery life. We mostly ended up with almost 20-22 percent battery left for the day and that was impressive with the amount of navigation we did daily. But if you an average user you might even get 35 to 40 percent battery left for the day.

When we break it out for you in simple words than for a college going person who uses a lot of social media with maximum video consumption than to the battery will survive a day easily. Also, any other person like a businessman or housewife or corporate working person, the Gionee A1’s battery will surely last you one full day on a single charge.

8. Call Quality

The Gionee A1 Mobile comes with dual-SIM 4G VoLTE support. The SIM slot is hybrid (Micro + Nano/ microSD), which means it can either be used with two SIM cards or one SIM with one microSD card. About a common question about Jio, the A1 does support Jio’s 4G VoLTE networks, so you can easily use 4G data & calling of Jio, or any other network as well.

To Note, both SIM networks can’t be configured to 4G at the same time, so if you are using 4G data of any other service provider then your Jio SIM card will be deactivated for that particular time because Jio SIM only works on 4G and not 3G or 2G. About the microSD card, we didn’t find the need of using additional storage and 64GB (about 52 GB users available) was sufficient for us.

In our review time, we mostly used two SIM cards (Jio 4G and Vodafone 2G) and didn’t face any issue with any of the network services on Gionee A1.

The earpiece speaker was quite loud and we mostly kept lowering down the volume, so be sure of audio loudness in any kind of noisy environment. The Gionee A1 features two speaker grills at the bottom edge, out of which primary mic is hidden in the bottom left speaker grill while the right side speaker grill is the loudspeaker.

There is no secondary noise cancellation mic, but we didn’t find people complaining about more noise during calls, so that shouldn’t be a problem too. About the call quality, all calls on both networks were clear, but especially for Jio, the HD call quality was excellent.

Overall, the Gionee A1 performs on par with the expectation when it comes to calling quality.

9. Price

The Gionee comes in three color options – Gray, Black, and Gold. We received the Gold color variant, which had white bezels on the front. The A1 comes in single storage and RAM combination. It packs a 4GB RAM and 64GB internal storage for a price of Rs. Rs. 19,999.

The Gionee A1 Mobile is an average performing smartphone but with a solid build and quality camera combination. On the top of it, the A1 packs a big 4010mAh battery that will never run out of charge in a day if you are a normal to moderate user. So you are a youngster or a business person then the big battery of Gionee A1 is an advantage that you get in a good overall package.

Gionee is also promising an extra one year warranty, which means buyers get 2 years warranty on the phone.

So, do we really recommend the Gionee A1? Should you buy it?

Honestly, there is nothing wrong about the Gionee A1 and at the same time nothing very great. Gionee has kept the balance between the quality and the price. Two impressive things that of course stand out from the crowd is its big 4010mAh battery which cuts down to your everyday charging problem along with a great front 16-megapixel selfie camera.

One thing that we were particularly impressed with was the improvement in Gionee’s Amigo OS over the previous version and latest Android 7.0, but having said that we prefer stock Android and it would have been great if they’d included some more features like the Google Assistant from pure Android.

So at last, you are looking at a solidly built premium quality smartphone with good cameras, and battery as well as okay performance in Gionee A1. The company will be selling it offline in stores for Rs. 19,999 and this is probably the biggest advantage that Gionee A1 has over other phones. However, in Online space, the A1 gets good competition from phones like Lenovo Z2 Plus which has the Snapdragon 820, 4GB RAM and 64GB internal storage for just Rs. 17,499.

Gionee A1 Specification

GENERAL INFORMATION
Brand	Gionee
Model	Gionee A1
Dimensions	154.5mm x 76.5mm x 8.3mm
Weight	180 grams
SIM	Dual-SIM (Hybrid) (Micro + Nano/ microSD)
Colors	Mystic white, Astro black, ice platinum
SOFTWARE
Operating System	Android 7.0 (Marshmallow)
DISPLAY
Display Features	LTPS 2.5D touchscreen, 16M colors
Resolution	1080 x 1920pixels (401ppi)
Size (in inches)	5.5inch
PERFORMANCE
Chipset	Qualcomm MSM8996 Snapdragon 821
CPU	MediaTek Helio P10 MT6755 (8-cores, 2.0GHz)
GPU	Andreno 530
MOMERY
Card Slot	microSD, up to 256 GB single sim MicroSD, up to 256 GB (uses SIM 2 slot) Dual Sim
internal	64 GB, 4 GB RAM
CAMERA
Primary	13-megapixel
Features	Phase Detect AF
Video	1080p Video @ 30fps
Secondary	16-megapixel
SOUND
Alert Type	Vibration; MP3, WAV ringtones
Loudspeaker	Yes, with stereo speakers
COMMS
WLAN	Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band, Wi-Fi Direct, hotspot
Bluetooth	v4.1, A2DP, LE, aptX
GPS	Yes, with A-GPS, GLONASS
Radio	Yes
USB	V3.1, Type-C 1.0 reversible connector
BATTERY
Type	Non-removable Li-Po 4010mAh battery
Battery backup	Up to 10 h (multimedia)
FEATURES
Sensors	Accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass, barometer
Messaging	SMS(threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Mail, IM
Browser	HTML5

Price in India: Gionee A1 – Rs. 16,999