Gionee announces A1 and A1 Plus: going big on batteries and selfies

Gionee has announced the A1 and A1 Plus at MWC 2017. The Chinese manufacturer aims to deliver the goods in both battery and camera departments with its soon-to-be-released handsets: here’s a look at what they offer.

Both A1 and A1 Plus pack Full-HD displays, with the A1 housing a 5.5-inch screen and the A1 Plus being the larger at 6-inches. Inside, the A1 is powered by an Helio P10 octa-core processor (which was announced in 2015) while the A1 Plus houses a more modern 64-bit Helio P25 octa-core processor @2.5 GHz with Mali-T880 MP4 GPU.

The A1 and A1 Plus make use of 2.5D glass and arrive with 4 GB of RAM, 64 GB of internal storage and support for microSD cards. They’re running Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box with Gionee’s Amigo 4.0 UI on top.

Now we’ve got that out of the way, it’s the camera and battery details of these devices that are most interesting. On the A1, you’ll find a 13 MP rear camera and 16 MP front-facing camera, while the A1 Plus sports a dual 13 MP / 5 MP setup on the back and whopping 20 MP camera at the front. Both devices come with LED flash on the front and rear also.

As for the battery, the smaller handset has a 4010 mAh battery while the A1 Plus’ battery comes in at 4,550 mAh. That’s significantly more than the circa 3,000 mAh battery of recent Android flagships — expect the devices to be quite a bit thicker to fit them in, though.

The Gionee A1 will go on sale for EUR 349 (~$370) from early March while the A1 Plus starts at EUR 499 (~$530), but you’ll have to wait until April for that. Gionee is yet to reveal US availability details.

What are your thoughts on the new handsets from Gionee? Let us know in the comments.