The Chinese company is back with an LTE refresh model that’s confusingly dubbed the Elife S7, which manages to retain the same slimness (read: not 7mm thick), the standard headphone jack and a lighter weight of just 126.5g, while packing some nice upgrades. First of all, you get a slightly bigger 5.2-inch 1080p AMOLED screen, along with a similar 1.7GHz octa-core MediaTek chipset with 2GB of RAM, but enhanced with 64-bit computing, multi-mode LTE radio and dual micro-SIM slots. And yes, the phone runs on Android Lollipop with Gionee’s customized UI. There’s also a more generous 2,750mAh battery.
The Elife S7 comes with a pair of seemingly nice cameras: 13 megapixels on the back and eight megapixels on the front, both of which support the usual beautification tricks. Similarly, Gionee has joined the local crowd to emphasize its phone’s HiFi audio experience that’s provided by an unspecified audio chip (192kHz sampling rate, 24-bit processing, 105dB signal-to-noise ratio, 90dB total harmonic distortion), along with the bundled “professional” earphones. Here is the full specs.
The only letdown is perhaps the price: 399 or about $450. That’s relatively steep, especially when you’re stuck with just 16GB of internal storage. The Elife S7 is already up for pre-order in China ahead of its March 18th launch, with availability in India to follow on April 3rd.
