Gionee S12 Review

July 18, 2020 0

The last Gionee phone I reviewed was the M11 and that was in January of this year. Well in my hands I’ve got the Gionee S12, Gionee’s latest smartphone for 2020. What does the S12 pack and is this a phone you should consider buying.

The Gionee S12 comes in a standard white box with some brief specs on the box. In the box we have the S12, a service center card, a user manual, a sim ejector tool and a transparent rubber case. Always nice to have a protective case included in the package until you’re able to buy a proper case.

Underneath the first compartment we have a pair of earphones, a USB A to USB C charging and data transfer cable and an 18watts quick charging brick.

Unwrapping the Gionee S12 reveals a very beautiful back panel. Its glows and gives you different looks under different lighting. I absolutely love this back design and this blue color just looks stunning.

The Gionee S12 has the following hardware specifications

A 6.5 inch 20:9 aspect ratio HD+ IPS LCD screen
4 GB RAM and 64 GB internal storage which is expandable to 256 GB via a micro SD card
An Octa-core Helio A25 processor in the CPU department
There’s a 4000 mah battery powering this device
13MP selfie camera
A quad camera setup at the rear of the device comprising of a 16MP, two 2MP and an 8MP camera. The 16MP rear camera has a super pixel mode that can take shots up to 96MPs.
Other specs include a rear placed fingerprint reader, a 3.5 mm earphone port, a USB C charging port which allows up to 18 watts fast charging, a dual nano sim tray and the device runs on Android 10.

Build

The build of this phone is quite good. You’ve got a plastic back plate which is a positive as it won’t shatter if you drop the phone and It also helps keep the price of the phone low. The design however is a joy to behold. Very clean design and great color on this one

Software and Display

I like the software on the Gionee S12, it’s a pixel-esque software. No bloatware and no heavy skin looks exactly like a pixel launcher. It’s fairly fast and smooth and the gesture navigation work pretty well on this one although there are occasional stutters. The Gionee S12 runs on Android 10 which is a good thing. I do hope the Gionee team will be upgrading the OS to Android 11 when its available. I’ll reach out to the Gionee team to find out if this will happen. Overall the software here is clean and feels light.

The display on the Gionee S12, is a HD+ screen meaning its a slightly higher than 720p screen. Colors are quite vibrant on this display and videos and images are clear. Note that your viewing experience will be capped at 720p on platforms like YouTube.

Videos looked good, viewing angles were okay and you should be fine with the video output on this screen. Although of your pixel peeping, you be able to see the pixels on this screen. Nevertheless this screen is decent and should help you get more time out of the battery on this device.

Battery

And talking about the battery, there’s a 4000mah battery on the S12 and its held up good from my two days of use. Its always carried me to the end of the day with about 15% battery left at the end the day and this is with morderate use. This means you would need to charge just once a day.
Screen on time averages at 5 hours on this phone.

Cameras

There are four cameras at the rear of the Gionee S12. These cameras take pretty decent shots that are useable mostly on social platforms. The super pixel mode however allows you take high resolution images that should allow you print the if you so choose.

The images are quite clean and the color reproduction in the images deserve some accolades. Overall i’m very impressed with the images from the Gionee S12. Check the gallery below

CPU

The S12 uses a Helio A25 processor which is an entry level ARM SoC for smartphones that was introduced in early 2020. This Helio A25 integrates a LTE Cat.4 modem, a PowerVR GE8320 graphics card and a 1080p30 video decoder and encoder. This means on this phone you’re limited to 4G bandwidths and your video recording output is capped at 1080p@30FPS.

Gaming

You can do casual gaming on this phone but don’t expect to run heavy 3D titles at high settings on this phone and that’s down to the processor and GPU. You’d be fine playing 3d titles at low or medium settings and you’d be fine with 2D games. But still, the phone performs decently with this chip. The animations are a bit slow but you can make them faster by reducing the animation scales in developer settings.

Pricing and Conclusion

So how much will the Gionee S12 cost you if you decide to pick one up. The Gionee S12 will set you back N64,900 (that’s $145) and it is available as at the release of this video. I’ll leave a link to where you can pick one up in the video description.

Guys if you have any questions, please leave them in the comment section and also follow me on my social media platforms to reach me personally.

Gionee S12 Review