Gionee Dream D1 In-Depth Review
TheHubtech These days, there is huge competition between domestic mobile manufacturers in India. New brands are introduced in India every month. These new brands are just like the other domestic brands – They offer great specs at a low price. One such brand is Gionee. But Gionee is a bit different from other brands as it make their own hardware and sell it unlike the other companies which just rebrand the phone. We can consider Micromax in this category. Micromax buys phones from different brands and then rebrand and sell them. Take a look at Micromax A110 – Its actually a phone named T2 by Cynus Mobiles.
Okay, so enough chit-chat. Now lets move on to the review of Gionee Dream D
Now lets see how it performs. I will be talking about aspects like Build Quality, Design, Display, Performance, Battery, Connectivity, etc. So, lets get started.
Build Quality and Design
When you will hold the device for the first time in your hands, you will feel that the device is quite light and robust. The phone is made up of glossy plastic on the edges. The back cover of the phone is textured which is quite durable. The bezels of the phone are quite glossy and are a fingerprint magnet. The Screen is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass The phone looks a bit similar to the Google Nexus The phone has rounded corners around the edges. There are no hard keys or buttons on the front of the device. This makes the device look quite good. The power button is on the left of the device which is quite strange. The headphone jack is on the bottom of the device and the USB port is on the top of the device.
Screen Quality
The device boasts of a 4.65 inch Super AMOLED HD Plus display with a resolution of 1280×720 pixels making it 316 ppi. The screen is very beautiful. Its also visible under direct sunlight. The viewing angles are great on the device. The phone also houses a light sensor which makes an option available for automatic brightness. The HD screen makes it a joy for playing games and watching videos and movies. Gionee has chosen the right size for the screen, the screen nor too big or too small. The size is just perfect. I have also compared the size of the phone with some other phones so that you can get an idea of the size of the phone. The screen also supports 5-point multi-touch which can help playing games on the device very well.
Performance
The phone is powered by a Mediatek MT6589 quad-core 1.2GHZ Cortex A7 processor combined with a 1GB of RAM which is nowadays usually found on all budget devices such as Micromax A11The phone also has a PowerVR SGX 544 MP GPU which is awesome. The CPU, RAM and GPU combined together makes the device a good portable gaming device. The Browsing was a joy on the device, there was no lag or slow downs when browsing through different pages or when panning. The quad-core processor helps in multi-tasking. There were no lags when using 7 different apps at once. But, sometimes when the phone gets overloaded, the phone hangs and you have to reboot the device.
The Gaming was quite good. The device ran almost all famous HD games available on the Playstore. I tried playing games such as Wild Blood, Asphalt 7, Dead Trigger, Six Guns, Blood and Glory 2, FIFA 12, etc. The benchmarks on the device were quite good. You can take a look at the benchmarks here
User Interface
The UI is not so great but it surely has more features than the stock Android. But at least Gionee has put an effort in customizing the UI unlike the other companies such as Spice and Micromax, they don’t even customize the UI but they just load up the UI with bloatware. The Gionee’s UI lacks the performance of the Stock Android. There were two main problems that I found on the UI – The Font was too small even it was set to large size. So, we can say that the choice of font is bad. The second problem was the lag. The Launcher lacked the smoothness. If Gionee had put more time in customizing the UI, the UI must be awesome. But the UI is highly optimized it gives 670MB+ free RAM which is great.
Gionee has also added an app named Change which allows changing the theme, wallpapers and transition effects of the launcher. Gionee has added 5 different themes which you can choose. I personally use Stock Android theme. The Wallpaper change option allows to change lockscreen, menu and desktop wallpapers. They have also added 9 transitions for the desktop that you can choose.
Multimedia and Camera
The Speakers are loud and clear. They don’t distort even at the max volume. Gionee has also bundled a standard pair of headphones with the Phone. The Headphones are decent, the bass is not so good but its good enough to play some games with the headphones on. Gionee have also included SRS Enhancements on the Music Player which increases the performance of the headphones. The Speakers are decent but are not so great but they are loud enough to fill a medium-sized room with music. The phone supports all types of music formats. You can also play up to 1080p videos on the device. There were no issues in calls. The in-call volume was loud and clear.
The Camera is good. The Clarity is awesome. But the problem is colours, the colours look artificial, they look darker than the actual colour. The 8MP camera also supports capturing full HD 1080p videos. The camera app also has options to capture HDR images. The images clicked in day-light were good and the low light images were decent too. The Front Camera is 1MP, the clarity is good and the video chatting experience is great.
Box Contents
The device comes with some interesting number of items. A USB Charger, Back Covers, Warranty Card, Service Center List, Standard Quality Earphones, User Guide, and a Terms and Conditions Slip. The charger is standard. You can remove the cable from the charger to use it as a USB cable and plug it back in the charger to use as a wall charger. Earphones are standard too. It would have been better if they have offered an in-ear style headphones. The Phone also comes bundled with a 16GB SD Card. The device has a manufacturer’s warranty of 365 Days.
Applications
The phone comes with a number of good apps for daily use. Gionee has added Social media apps such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. They have even added RAM optimization apps. The RAM apps are good and really work. The OS is protected by NQ Mobile Security which works good. For low light situations they have added a Flashlight app and for travelers and hikers they have added a compass app. For officers they have added Kingsoft office which helps to view word and excel documents. For Cricket lovers, they have added Cricket app for latest scores. The have also included Whatsapp and Weather App.
The phone also has 2 Music apps. One is the V5 Music and the other one is normal music app. The V5 Music app shows some great visualizations of dancing people when you are listening to a song. The Normal Music has a unique feature too – It shows Sunrise scene in background when you listen to music, when the sun is just about to rise. It also shows day and sunset scenes.
Battery
The phone house a battery of 2100mAh while all the other brands include this much capacity of battery in phones above 5 inch. The battery life was very good. The phone lasted 14.5 hours with 4 hours of gaming, 3 hours of calling, a few video calls, a few YouTube videos and 4 hours of browsing with all time Wi-Fi kept on.
Verdict
The device is great. A phone with quad-core processor and Super AMOLED screen is a great choice. I am sure it won’t disappoint you.