Gionee S6 Pro Review
Gionee S6 and Gionee S6S are very average products. Just their battery life and build quality is good. Their prices were a little more than Rs 15,000. In such a situation, we were also not expecting too much. However, the price of S6 Pro is Rs 23,999. In this way, Gionee 6S Pro is in direct competition with Xiaomi Mi 5 (Review), Moto Z Play (Review), HTC One A9 and Asus ZenFone 3 (ZE520KL). Does the S6 Pro have enough to justify its price? Let us know.
Gionee S6 Pro design and build
The design profile of the new model is very similar to the Gionee S6, barring one radical change. The design of the edges is eye-catching. According to Gionee, the chassis of S6 Pro is made of metal, due to which it looks premium and is also strong. The phone is slim and does not feel very heavy. The fit and finishing is good for the most part, except for the home button which has a bit of a rough edge.
The display has adequate illumination for outdoor use. The resolution is also decent for sharp images and text. It has a 5.5-inch full-HD IPS panel with Gorilla Glass 3 protection. Two capacitive buttons are provided but they do not have backlighting. You will also get a notification LED along with the front camera at the top of the phone. The hybrid dual-SIM tray is present on the left side while the power and volume buttons are on the right side. The headphone socket is at the top and the USB Type-C port at the bottom. A mono speaker is provided in this phone.
There is a 13-megapixel camera on the backpanel along with a single LED flash. The fingerprint sensor is integrated into the home button. Instead of writing the IMEI number on the metal frame, Gionee has used a simple sticker which is an eyesore.
The S6 Pro comes with a 10-watt wall adapter, USB cable, headset, screen guard, and silicone case. The quality of the accessories is good and they seem durable. The design is good and due to the slim profile, there will be no problem in using it with one hand. The phone sometimes slips from the hands, but we would not call it bad.
Gionee S6 Pro specification and features
The octa-core MediaTek Helio P10 chipset has been used in the phone, which is more powerful than the commonly used MT6753 chipset. You will get 64 GB storage with 4 GB RAM. You will be able to expand the storage up to 128 GB via microSD card.
Other specifications of Gionee S6 Pro will include Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi B/G/N, GPS, FM radio and USB OTG. Looking at the Pro version, we expected Wi-Fi 802.11ac and NFC. But it is not available. This phone supports Voice over LTE along with 4G LTE.
Like the S6S, the S6 Pro will run on Gionee’s Amigo 3.2 user interface based on Android Marshmallow. This is not our favorite version. This is a one layer UI.
You will find Edge Bar in the Settings app. This is a vertical list of app shortcuts that can be accessed by swiping left or right on the home button. You can add 6 shortcuts here. Through the split screen feature, you will also be able to reply to incoming messages while watching a video. For this you will not even have to turn off the video player.
Since it has Amigo UI, you will get many apps pre-installed. You will also be able to remove all third parties. But it will not be possible to do this with Gionee’s app.
Gionee’s own VR Launcher app is provided in the phone which works with most Google Cardboard VR headsets. We tried using it with the OnePlus Loop VR headset. It ran without any problems.
Gionee S6 Pro Performance
Despite heavy skin, overall performance is good. We never felt any slowdown while switching between apps or playing system animations. The edges of the phone become a little hot while using the camera. Sometimes even the entire body of the phone gets hot. But this problem did not happen again and again. GPU performance was a bit weak. The fingerprint sensor works well to unlock the device.
The S6 Pro does a good job of media playback. Videos with higher bitrates played fine. The audio quality is also quite good. However, the speaker is a bit weak and doesn’t produce much sound at higher volumes. The stock audio and video player separates your media files well. You also get DTS audio boost.
The lack of PDAF or laser autofocus in the 13-megapixel primary camera means that it is a bit difficult to capture sharp and blur-free photos. The time taken to focus could have been slightly less. In low light it focuses even slower. The lack of detail and color is clearly visible in landscape shots, we encountered this problem even in daylight. These pictures do not look bad when viewed on the phone display, but on a larger screen the shortcomings become clearly visible. We clearly saw the lack of detail in the macro shots. Photos taken in low light are worse than average. There is a lot of lack of detail and a lot of noise.
Gionee has made big claims regarding the screen flash feature present in the handset for selfies. But the reality is that it is simply not capable of illuminating your face, leave alone a group selfie. The 8 megapixel front camera is not very special. The good thing is that the camera interface is easy to use. With this you get many options. You have Pro, Slow Motion and Panorama shooting modes. The video recording capability is 1080 pixels. Its quality is only average. We feel that the camera could have been better.
(Click to see camera samples of Gionee S6 Pro)
The 3130 mAh battery lasted for 10 hours 13 minutes in the video loop test, which would be considered good. In normal use, we were able to use the phone for more than a day without charging it. You will not get fast charging, but the charger provided with the phone fully charges the battery in about two hours.
our decision
Expensive smartphones in the mid-range segment are generally good all-round handsets. These devices are not made keeping the budget in mind, so in such a situation the company tries to provide excellent performance in one or two departments. And the satisfactory performance in other departments also keeps the customers happy. Gionee’s past S6 models have been great in terms of battery life and build quality but in the rest of the department they were nothing worth remembering. Sadly, nothing has changed on the S6 Pro either.
Apart from the build quality, battery life and display, there is nothing in this phone that would make you choose it over similarly priced smartphones from Lenovo, Xiaomi, Asus or HTC. Cameras are the weak link. The selfie camera with the primary camera gives average performance in all types of lighting. The phone gets a little hot while using the camera. Gionee has not provided features like Wi-Fi 802.11ac, NFC, backlit capacitive buttons and fast charging. We cannot suggest you to buy this phone.
