BARCELONA—Gionee promised us a selfie-tastic experience ahead of Mobile World Congress with the A10 and A10 Plus and that's kind of what we got.
It's true that the Android Nougat-based phones take the somewhat novel approach of opting for a larger camera sensor in the front than in the back. There's a 16-megapixel front facer on the A10 and a 13-megapixel camera on the rear.
The bigger A10 Plus has opted for an even more unorthodox 20-megapixel selfie shooter—presumably for people with a lot of friends—and a dual 13- and 5-megapixel setup on the back. We were unable to determine the purpose of the second lens in a quick hands on; we presume it's related to contrast levels, but none of the staff on hand were able to help us there.
Both phones feature the now-standard beauty mode, which makes your facial features look all smoothed out and pastel, like you've just applied a load of digital concealer. There's also a "whitening" mode, presumably for goths who want to look extra badass on Snapchat.
The A10 and A10 Plus were pretty quick to rattle off selfies though, with neither device seriously lagging. They're otherwise not that selfie-centric—especially compared to the Meitu T8—but specs-wise, Gionee's A10 series is pretty decent.
The Gionee logo—which funnily enough resembles a smiling face—is positioned where you'd expect a fingerprint scanner would be. There are finger scanners, but they're built into the menu keys on the front.
Screen brightness, Bluetooth, and other basic controls can be accessed from a control panel you get to by pulling up from the bottom like iOS, a departure from most Android phones, which require you to pull down from the top. Lack of decent Wi-Fi and SIM cards on the show floor prevented us from checking out how well browsing worked and security tags stopped us from getting a great look at much else.
The phones suppoedly include Waves MaxxAudio processing, but the pounding background music prevented us from hearing exactly what that brings to music played out of the stereo speakers.
Both phones feature large batteries (4010mAh and 4450mAh) with fast charging mechanisms that allows for a full charge in about two hours, Gionee says. Both phones feature Full HD resolution screens, measuring 5.5 and 6 inches across, respectively.
The A10 Plus felt significantly heftier and a little cumbersome, though buyers with large hands probably won't find this much of an issue. To us, immediately going from one phone to another, the difference in weight was perhaps more noticeable than it otherwise would be.
In terms of onboard storage, you get 64GB on paper and 4GB of RAM in both. The Gionee A10 is powered by a Helio P10 2.0GHz octa-core chip while the bigger A10 Plus gets a faster Helio P25 2.5GHz CPU, again with eight cores.
We're still in the dark in terms of how much either of Gionee's new A series phones will set you back, which is the ultimate yardstick for how much of a great value buy these may or may not be. No word on if we'll see them in the US either, where cell phone enthusiasts might know Gionee largely via the Blu brand.