Gionee F103 Review: Good Looks, Decent Hardware, With Some Flaws

With Narendra Modi’s make in India campaign, Gionee hops into making a smartphone that’s been completely manufactured in India, the Gionee F103. Gionee’s F103 is a budget segmented fashion series smartphone, which mainly focuses on having the best possible looks on a budget. Although the Gionee F103 packs in some decent hardware along with good looks, it manages to fail terribly in some of the most important aspects of a modern day smartphone, let’s check it out.

Display

The Gionee F103 Fashion series smartphone comes with a 5 inches of 720x 1280p resolution display while giving a pixel density of 249ppi. For the price the display is decent. The overall display is not that vivid and is less saturated giving it more of a flat and neutral look.

A lot of people who understand colors and like to have it raw and untouched would particularly like this display. But for an avid user, it’s just a faded and less colorful display which might not be able to please a lot of people considering the fact that there are other smartphones in the same price segment giving off a much better display and a screen resolution which is as good as 1080p or FullHD.

Design & Build

The Gionee F103 is built to look reminiscent to it’s older brother Gionee Elife S7. Although both of them are of very different series, they share some common factor in terms of the looks. Just like the flat front and back with a shiny reflective back. Although the S7 houses a glass back panel, the F103 does a great job in faking the same with a reflective plastic yet durable back panel.

Apart from that it also has a solid plastic rim surrounding the edges of the phone making it look like as if it was made out of metal, while it’s not. Touted as cost-effective device for image conscious, the F103 definitely marks as one of the good looking smartphone under Rs 10,000 price range.

Performance

The Gionee F103 Fashion series smartphone is targeted towards a very specific kind of audience who enjoys having a good-looking smartphone, and care less about the specifications.

Although, that being said the F103 does spits some really good performance and in terms of the hardware it totally justifies the price. So the F103 comes with a Mediatek MT6735 Quad-core CPU, which is clocked at 1.3 GHz and is a Cortex-A53 chip. Along with that it comes bundled with 2GB or RAM and Mali-T720MP2 GPU, which basically on paper should tear through the benchmark scores. And without a surprise it does.

Gaming

As we discussed above in the performance, the Gionee F103 does features a great hardware for the price, and it also does performs really well. Not just only in the benchmarks, but it handles day to day tasks and some light to medium games really well. Although once in a while it stutters while playing some heavy games.

It won’t be a problem if you just lower the graphics to match the phone’s performance. Overall, the Mediatek chipset does justice with the gaming performance and it does not let the device heat up a lot. Which makes a lot of sense, because you wouldn’t like to carry a device that gets hot or worst case scenario, it explodes. Thankfully the thermals of the Gionee F103 works really well and as intended and it keeps the device in a controlled temperature.

Camera

 

The Gionee F103 comes with an 8 megapixel of back facing camera that manages to click some good images in decent lighting and decent images in low light. Just like the display the images from the camera are also washed out and less saturated. Although this camera manages to keep the details of the image pretty well, even in low light.

The HDR mode on the Gionee F103 also does a nice job, nothing too surprising but manages to save the day.

On the other hand the front facing camera is surprisingly good. Atleast compared to it’s competitors out there. The selfies from the front facing cameras are quite good with lots of details. Can’t really complain much considering the fact that the back camera on this isn’t the best in the first place.

 

Software

In terms of software, the Gionee F103 is running on Android 5.0 Marshmallow with Amigo UI on top of it. If you are coming from stock android or TouchWiz, you will find the UI to be a lot different. There is particularly no app drawer here, and all of the installed apps show up in the home screen, and with side-to-side pane slide you can reveal more home screens as usual. Due to the lack of a dedicated app drawer it takes up less resources to run the UI and overall if feels a lot faster.

Battery Life

Gionee is one of those brands who gives their best attempt to keep the battery technology as much efficient as they can. With a optimized software and 2400 mAh of battery the Gionee F103 manages to cut through the day. Although a bigger battery would’ve been much appreciated, the F103 manages to do a fair job.

Verdict

The Gionee F103 is a great phone for those who appreciate good looks and great design. Even though the phone looks good, in hand it just feels quite cheap and plasticy. With a poor camera, if you are even remotely serious about photography then it isn’t the phone for you.

Update

Interestingly, the F103 has launched 1GB and 3GB variants at various price points – As far as the price goes, the Gionee F103 is now available in India at INR 8,499 for 1GB, INR 9,999 for 2GB and, INR 10,999 for the 3GB variant.

This review is written by Sudipto Chakraborty, a 18 year old is a techie at heart, does technology reviews and video blogging for a living. He loves Apple as much as sarcasm. Has a soft corner for well built premium devices. He also runs a gadget blog – TekhSquare.