GIONEE S6S

Great metal body and the intuitive flash for selfies make this a good choice

Gionee S6s looks cool and is very sturdy due to its durable body having metal finish at the back. S6s comes in two colors Latte Gold and Mocha Gold and Latte Gold is our review unit. The face of the phone flaunts 5.5-inch FullHD display with smooth edges and Gorilla Glass 3 coating for protection. On the front, it gets a LED flash along with a camera, ear speaker, and light sensor, whereas three smooth capacitive navigation button are at the bottom. The rear camera and LED flash, along with fingerprint scanner and Gionee’s logo are in a vertical symmetry at the back side.

A speaker grille is placed at the bottom accompanied by the company branding. The right panel houses the power and volume rocker buttons while the left picks the hybrid SIM slot. The bottom holds the regular Micro-USB charging slot and a 3.5mm audio jack. Overall about the design we just want that it is not unique and more common.

Display: Viewing angles are good and we didn’t find any issue during our usage. It produces vibrant colors with good contrast value. The IPS LCD panel offers rich brightness but the protective layer reflect under direct sunlight but still S6 manages to give us a clear picture. Watching movies and playing games on it while indoor was a pleasure.

Camera: The front fixed focus 8-megapixel packs with the f/2.2 aperture along flash module. Selfies are great with decent color accuracy depending on the conditions, like in the night or low light. The Gionee front flash and camera is effective up to only some extent. The rear 13-megapixel camera offers decent output both in daylight as well as in low light. However, when you zoom the picture you will notice some lack of details. But the pictures taken in bright sunlight are very good.

The camera app features are very impressive and did not suffer from any lags. There are plethora of options to choose from including Panorama, Slow motion, Macro, Night, Time lapse, Text recognition, HDR, Professional, Smart scene, Ultra pixel, Mood photo, PicNote, GIF, and Smart scan. The camera app also offers additional settings such as an option to choose a Scene mode, Exposure, face slimming and White balance among others.

Performance and Software: It is powered by a 1.3GHz octacore MediaTek MT6753 SoC, coupled with 3GB of RAM. The Gionee S6s comes with 32GB of onboard storage and supports hybrid dual-SIM card slot that means it can be expanded via microSD card (up to 128GB).

The Gionee S6s runs on Amigo 3.2 based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow. There is no app drawer and all the apps are spread across multiple home-screens. Gionee as the S6s smartphone ships with several pre-loaded apps such as Xender, Hotoday, Compass, Mobile anti-theft app, G Store, System Manager, and Mood Wallpaper. Some other features of OS are Fake Calls, Super Screenshot tool, Theme Park, and extreme battery mode settings.

Performance wise the phone did very well, but we found a little bit lag during multitasking. However, there is no serious performance-related glitches in our daily usage. Further, we noticed the Gionee S6s dropped some frame when we played games like Dead Trigger 2. Overall experience was good without any heating issue and the device is powered by a MediaTek processor which is sufficient for normal usage.

The voice calls on the Gionee S6s were clear and we didn’t face call drops. Also, we used a JIO Sim in it and to test VoLTE there was no issue in voice clarity. The Gionee S6s smartphone powered by a non-removable 3150mAh battery. In our video loop test, the Gionee S6s able to play 1080p at full volume for 6 hours and 10 minutes, which is good. In normal usage, the Gionee S6s easily lasted for more than 30 hours. And for full charging from 0% to 100%, it took more than two 2 hours.

Bottomline: With decent and satisfactory performance the phone is good for regular usage.