Gionee Elife E7 Review: A Smartphone With the Potential To Rise

Gionee Elife E7: OS, Apps and Performance

The Gionee Elife E7 is based on a heavily customized build of Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, with the Amigo 2.0 UI slapped on top of it - an upgrade over the previous iteration of its user interface skin.

To be more precise, users with previous experience of Xiaomi's MiUi ROM will be more accustomed to the Elife E7. However, the device doesn't feature a separate app launcher and instead, the app icons are combined with the home screen.

This highly customized version of Android 4.2.2 is not really a treat to use of get used to either. There are high chances that a time will soon come when you begin to grow tired of the device's UI. On using, users will find out that all the apps are displayed on the home screen and have been heavily redesigned. But oversized icons will indeed make it hard to search for apps, and the loss of homescreen widgets can really get on to your nerves sometimes.

Talking about the widget offering a bit more, the absence of widgets can make it a bit problematic for hardcore Android users on the get go, until you accustom yourself to this widgetless offering.

The Elife E7 also comes with ‘Smart Gestures' like features including the tap-to-wake feature or the smart answer feature. Although the tap-to-wake feature can be a bit hectic at times since it requires only the slightest of touches to automatically light up the device. So you can imagine what will happen every time a light brush is made over the device when inside the pocket. However, there's the option to turn that setting off.

The E7's firmware might also seem a bit unpolished as there can be random slowdowns in the animation, with certain parts of the settings menu suddenly shutting down which can create a lot of headache for users.

Apart from all that, the device includes several other apps that are meant for power management, cleaning the cache, terminating background processes and even a certain Traffic Assistant for tracking in-device data usage.

The Gionee Elife E7, in terms of in-device processing power, comes with powerful hardware under the hood. The device is powered by a 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor that's coupled with Adreno 330 graphics and 2GB RAM (although it is to be noted here that the 32GB storage variant of the phone offers a greater 3GB RAM), and is enough to offer great performance. The only issue you will have here is the laggy software and the UI offering.

Out of the 16GB storage that's offered with the device, only 8.98GB is available to the user. And sadly enough, the phone's storage cannot be expanded as the phone doesn't offer a memory card slot.

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