Gionee has been on a roll lately, pushing out devices across multiple categories over the past year. The last phone we took a look at was the selfie-centered S6s, and now the company has come out with its slightly bigger brother, the S6 Pro.
By bigger, we don’t really mean on a dimensional scale, as the S6 Pro comes with a similar metal unibody design, a 5.5-inch FullHD display and even a similar camera set-up. The S6 Pro features the same sensor and aperture as the S6s, with only the lack of a front flash letting the S6s keep its selfie crown. The Pro makes up for this by including a screen flash, a useful trick we’re seeing more manufacturers adopt of late.
The phone manages to justify the Pro tag with an extra gigabyte of RAM (4GB in this case), more internal memory (64GB) and a faster MediaTek Helio P10 processor, though it actually uses a slightly smaller battery than the S6s, at 3130mAh.
The Pro is a well-built phone, and our gold variant exuded a certain premium feel. The back of the phone features the camera, flash and an indent with the Gionee logo, and the fingerprint sensor has been moved to the front of the phone. While I personally like this change, it is not an always-on sensor, and requires the home button to be depressed before it reads the fingerprint. We found the reader to be easily confused on occasion, taking a few tries to read our fingerprint.
On the software front, Gionee has stuck to Android 6.0 with their Amigo skin on top.
While Amigo is functionally quite versatile, on the visual front it leaves a little to be desired, with no app drawer and square icons, which crop existing ones awkwardly at times. Amigo is a little like Samsung’s TouchWiz of years past, throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the mix in terms of features. The phone has double tap to wake, smart dial and answer which respond to the phone being placed on the ear, quick access to shortcuts by drawing on the screen when it is locked and vibration reminders for missed notifications. The company has also included a nifty ‘edge bar’, which lets users access quick shortcuts by swiping from side to side on the fingerprint reader.
One of the highlight features of the S6 Pro is Virtual Reality (VR). The company is pushing the Pro as a VR phone and even offering a VR headset for Rs. 2,499 with the phone. The VR app features a VR video option, that lets users play VR content stored locally on the phone, and a tab that gives access to VR apps, which also features popular titles from the Play Store. While it’s a nice feature to have, the phone does not feature any specific VR hardware and FullHD resolution is still the bare minimum for the technology.
On the camera front, the performance is quite satisfactory in bright light, though highlights from multiple sources catch the camera out sometimes, making it return soft images. HDR mode helps solve this somewhat, and for photo addicts, the Pro comes with a huge number of modes and filters to play with.
While the Pro has lost out slightly on battery compared to the cheaper S6s, battery life is mostly unaffected, and the phone can easily get through a day of moderate usage, even longer if left on standby for extended periods.
Looking back, the Gionee S6 Pro is a solid device when it comes to build quality and a long feature list, but it is hard to ignore that the VR functionality doesn’t go much beyond an included app and optional headset.
There is also the fact that the S6 Pro is priced at Rs.23,999, a good Rs.6,000 more than the S6s, which can do a lot of the same with minor compromises. Value for money it is not, but if an affordable VR experience and basic software support is your thing, the Pro makes a decent case for itself.
