Gionee Elife E3 offers good value for money

Gionee Elife E3
Price: Rs 14,999

With so many smartphone brands in the market, we are usually apprehensive about the hardware of the newer names. But Chinese company Gionee has proven us wrong with its Elife E3. With a rubberised exterior and bright colours, the phone is a stunner.
The 4.7-inch display is one of the best features of this phone. It is hard to miss how the 1280x720 pixel resolution is brighter than most others phones. Like HTC and some other manufacturers, Gionee has added a custom user interface over the stock Android. This is well designed and does not slow down the phone while navigating. The icons are slightly curved from all the sides, with the bright colour making them stand out.

The slim 7.9-mm chassis makes the phone comfortable to hold. To protect the phone, Gionee has added a screen protector along with a back cover in the box. The transparent back cover fits so perfectly that while removing the cover, we often ended up removing the back panel as well. This is a dual-SIM smartphone with a slot for microSIM and a regular SIM card.

The phone has a quad-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz and paired with 1GB RAM to run the Android v4.1. So the E3 is up to most tasks and performs without any lag. The Quadrant score of the E3 was 3886 which is quite decent.

With Android devices facing an increasing threat of malware attacks, the E3 comes with NQ Security app that prompted for the downloaded app to be scanned. The 8 MP camera captured decent images when outdoors. Indoors, the images had noise. The colours felt washed out with the use of flash.

The 1800 mAh battery gives a backup of a day on heavy usage. It can easily last a day if used carefully.

Bag it or Junk it: A fine phone worth consideration