Gionee P7 Max review: Can be skipped

*Smooth performance
*Decent camera
*Good battery backup

Gionee is quite well-known in the Indian market for its affordable and feature-packed smartphones. The company recently added another handset - P7 Max, to its line-up. Priced at Rs 13,999, the Gionee P7 Max seems (on paper, at least) to be a fairly good smartphone. But is it actually a worthy buy?

We used the P7 Max for some time, and here is what we think of it.

Design and displayGionee has launched some really good-looking smartphones in the past. But with the P7 Max, it failed to impress us. Although it's not bad, we've seen a lot better from the company. The smartphone has a rear panel with curved edges, which make it easy to hold. It is also quite bulky, and maybe a little uncomfortable to use with one-hand due to its thickness.

The front is dominated by a 5.5-inch HD display of 720x1280 pixel resolution. Above the display lie a 5MP selfie-camera, an LED indicator, and earpiece and a proximity sensor. Three capacitive navigation buttons sit below the screen. As for the rear, the P7 Max has a removable back panel that hides two SIM card slots, a removable battery and a microSD card slot. There's also a 13MP camera, LED flash, speaker grille and a circular Gionee logo.

Coming to the sides, the right side has the power button and the volume rocker, while the charging port is at the bottom. At the top, there's a 3.5mm audio jack. The P7 Max has a 5.5-inch HD display of 720x1280 pixel resolution. Even though it has a low pixel density of around 267ppi, it looks good for the most part. During our testing, we found the screen to be quite vibrant. Colour reproduction is good and so are viewing angles. That said, the display is a bit on the reflective side when used under direct sunlight. Its reasonable size means that that the P7 Max can be used for everything from watching movies to playing games, on the go.
Overall we found the Gionee P7 Max's display to be adequate. But the design is definitely something that could've been better.

Performance and camera
Gionee P7 Max is powered by an octa-core MediaTek SoC paired with 3GB of RAM. There's also 32GB of internal storage, expandable further via micro SD cards. During the course of our testing, the smartphone delivered an appreciably well performance with no signs of lag. We used multiple apps and randomly switched between them, and P7 Max did not disappoint. Even heavy games like Asphalt 8: Airborne work without any major issues, except for a little heating.

The P7 Max has dual-SIM functionality and as far as call quality is concerned, it performed as expected. Signal reception was good enough during our test calls, so was VoLTE network connectivity

Coming to the battery life, Gionee P7 Max packs a 3,100mAh battery. During our testing, the battery easily lasted more than a day with moderate use.
The smartphone runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow with Gionee's Amigo UI skin baked on top. For the most part, the UI is clean and easy to use. There's no app drawer though, and all the apps are arranged on multiple home screens.

An interesting app pre-installed on the P7 Max is Chameleon. It allows users to pick any colour from an object by scanning it with the camera and then make a theme based on that colour.

Gionee P7 Max comes with a guest mode feature that can be used to hide some apps like call logs, messages and albums. This helps quite a bit in securing user data. There is also a child mode which, as the name suggests, limits access to the phone's features when it's handed over to kids. Other trademark Gionee features and apps like Mobile Anti theft, Theme Park and Extreme Battery Mode are there too.

Talking about the cameras, Gionee P7 Max sports a 13MP rear camera with LED flash and a 5MP front-facing camera for selfies. During our time with the device, we were quite impressed with the overall image quality. The clicked images have fair amount of detail and colour reproduction is accurate as well. The camera app itself is clean and easy to use, and includes multiple shooting modes. A beautification feature further helps in enhancing selfies. There is also a GIF mode which can be used to capture multiple images and create GIFs from them.

The 5MP selfie-camera, too, worked really well during our testing. Under good lighting conditions, it takes quite decent-looking selfies.

VerdictGionee P7 Max is a fairly balanced smartphone that performs all the day-to-day tasks quite well. But the only thing we didn't like about the phone was its design. It's also a bit bulky and not really that easy to use with one hand. Priced at Rs 13,999, the smartphone is pitted against the likes of the Moto G4 Plus, which offers an improved design, better CPU and a fingerprint sensor.

At a price tag of Rs 13,999, the Gionee P7 Max definitely isn't the best smartphone available in this price segment. The above mentioned Motorola G4 Plus can be considered a good alternative.

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