China’s Gionee had placed banners along the entrance walkways of the show, promoting its newest phone, so we had to go to the stand and check it out! Like several other Chinese vendors at MWC, Gionee’s phone was using an AMOLED screen from Samsung Display.
The S8 is Gionee’s flagship. The 5.5″ (1920 x 1080) AMOLED screen is encased in a metal chassis, with two SIM slots. The camera is a key feature: it has both laser and phase detection autofocus (PDAF), reducing autofocus time to 0.1 seconds. For resolution, for the rear camera is 16MP and the front is 8MP.
‘3D Touch’ (force-sensitive) is built in, and Gionee showed its use in various areas of the phone: pressing on the wallpaper will animate it. The technology can also be used to access a quick menu, or preview photos. A fingerprint sensor is installed in the home button.
An octa-core processor (four 1.95GHz cores and four 1.16GHz cores) from Mediatek (Helio P10) runs Android 6.0, with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of ROM. The Gionee OS, a skin of Android, supports two WhatsApp accounts to the same phone and can show a picture-in-picture.
The phone has a 3,000mAh battery and USB-C charging port.
Another AMOLED handset from Gionee was the M5 Plus, which is available in China now. It is a 6″ phablet with 1920 x 1080 resolution, and a 5,020mAh batttery (the ‘M’ in M5 stands for ‘Marathon’!). A fingerprint reader is built in, and the unit uses 2.5D glass. It has a quad-core 1.3GHz Mediatek processor, with 3GB of RAM and 64GB of ROM.
