At the launch of the Gionee Elife S5.5, Gionee President, William Lu and Head of Operations, Arvind Vohra, were quick to point out that the company wants to create two distinct lines of flagship level devices. While the earlier launched E series is for the camera centric, performance focussed devices. The S series is aimed at the fashion conscious and imbibes smart capabilities with stylish sensibilities. This is very evident from the outset and here we list out some of the differentiating criteria between the two devices.
The Gionee Elife E7 is clearly aimed at those who want a giant screen for multimedia consumption. The Elife S5.5 on the other hand combines the same resolution with a smaller and more pocketable 5inch panel. The display on the Elife E7 is of the IPS LCD variety while the S5.5 uses a Super AMOLED display.
Moving over to the back, the camera modules are very distinctly set apart. The Elife E7 is equipped with a 16MP rear facing camera and an 8MP front facing camera. The Elife S5.5 on the other hand makes do with a 13MP rear camera and a 5MP front facing camera. Both the phones have a single LED flash. The most visually distinct difference between the two handsets is the construction. While the Elife E7 is predominantly unibody polycarbonate with a rather scratch and fingerprint prone rear panel, the Elife S5.5 has a cutting edge aluminum alloy frame. This frame is part of the reason how Gionee has managed to shrink the phone down to just 5.5mm thickness. A Corning Gorilla Glass 3 coating can be found on both sides of the S5.5 which provides structural rigidity and makes the device fairly scratch resistant too. In our opinion, the Elife S5.5 looks and feels much better than the E7 which isn’t a surprise given the focus on style here.
There is a substantial difference in the internals of the two devices. While the Elife E7 is powered by a Snapdragon 800 processor clocked at 2.2 Ghz, the Elife S5.5 has a Mediatek MT6592 processor with 8 Cortex A7 cores clocked at 1.7 Ghz each. We’ve talked about the MediaTek octacore chipset earlier and it is worth mentioning that each core can reach a peak frequency of 2.0 Ghz. Other than that, users get 2GB of RAM in both the devices as well as 16GB of storage. Neither device has storage expansion capabilities. The Elife S5.5 runs on Android 4.4.2 while the Elife E7 is on 4.2.2. Both devices feature a heavily customized Amigo OS ROM.
The two devices while from the same stable are very distinct and a brief amount of time with both devices reaffirms this fact. The S5.5 is through and through a style conscious device that combines an extremely well built, slim frame with a range of pastel shades. While not as powerful as the E7, it is no slouch either and apart from the occasional frame skip on the prototype hardware, the device remained relatively smooth all around. Got questions? Check our hands on with the Elife S5.5 to find out more about it and don’t forget to read our Gionee Elife E7 review either!