GIONEE ELIFE E3

GIONEE ELIFE E3

The Elife E3 is a good-looking smartphone, but has a weak battery. 

Gionee, one of the little-known brands in India, recently launched the Dream D1, a quad-core smartphone that featured an HD AMOLED display and was good value for money. The company's newest smartphone, the E3, has similar features. The phone is well designed, is slim at 7.9mm, and has a rubberised matte-finished exterior and a strong, rugged frame, making it very comfortable to hold and operate. It weighs in at about 125gm.

The E3 has support for two SIM cards and can run GSM and WCDMA SIMs. While one slot is for a regular mini SIM card, the other supports micro SIM cards. This is beneficial for those who have an existing mini or micro SIM as they would not have to cut or exchange the existing ones.

The E3 features a quad-core Cortex A7 processor clocked at 1.2GHz, and 1GB of RAM. The graphics processor used here is the PowerVR SGX544 GPU, which should run 3D games comfortably. The internal storage is a good 16GB as compared to the Dream D1, which featured just 4GB. The display on this one is a 4.5-inch HD IPS panel with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels.

Connectivity options include the usual 3G, Wi-Fi B/G/N and Bluetooth. The operating system on the E3 is Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. Lastly, the internal battery fuelling the smartphone is a 1800mAh one as opposed to the 2100mAh battery used in the D1.

The 4.7-inch IPS HD display looks pretty awesome the moment you sweep the lockscreen to get to the homescreen. The colours are very vibrant and the high brightness will make you assume that the phone uses an AMOLED panel. The IPS display has no viewing angle issues and the crisp picture quality makes watching full HD videos a great experience. The onboard speaker is loud and clear. Though it is a bit shrill, the sound quality is good enough. Using earphones for personal entertainment is definitely recommended if you want better audio quality. The bundled earphones have good audio reproduction and you won’t need a replacement unless you are an audiophile.

The E3 sports an 8-megapixel camera at the rear and a 2-megapixel one on the front. The rear camera does a good job when compared to other smartphones in the category. Indoor shots are good and have nice colour balance, but are slightly vibrant. The pictures look good unless you zoom-in on a subject—this is where you will notice noise and grain. The Gionee Elife E3 probably won't last you through the day because it has a comparatively weak battery of 1800mAh. In our tests, which included music, video and streaming over Wi-Fi, the phone gave up after around six hours, which we feel is a bit too little.

FOR 
Good build; crisp and vibrant display; 16GB internal storage.


AGAINST 
Poor battery life; price is a bit too high.

SPECS 
Dimensions (WxHxD): 68x137x7.9 mm; Weight: 125gm; CPU: quad- core 1.2GHz; GPU: PowerVR SGX544; RAM: 1GB; Storage: 16GB; Display: 4.5-inch HD IPS; Camera: 8-megapixel + 2-megapixel; Battery: 1800mAh; OS: Android 4.2 Jelly Bean

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