Which smartphone is the best purchase? The Samsung Galaxy Grand 2 or the Gionee Elife E7 Mini.
For the design and display, the Samsung Galaxy Grand 2 copies Note 3’s design, having a plastic back with faux leather patters and fake stitching on the edges. It has curved edges and round corners, having an average thickness of 8.9 mm. It measures 146.8 mm in height and 75.3 mm in width and weights 163 grams. It has a TFT display at 5.25 inches that can render 720×1280 pixels at 280 grams, overshadowing the 4.7 inches IGZO screen of the Gionee Elife E7 Mini, which has the same resolution, but offers a higher pixel density of 312ppi.
The Gionee device's design is more interesting, because of the camera with rotating lens, which can be used both as a front camera or a back one. It has a rectangular shape with sharp corners, with the left and right sides being flat and the top and bottom sides being curved on the edges. It is available in white and black colors, while the Grand 2 has another pink variant. The Elife 7 Mini is 0.3mm thinner, has a height of 139.8 mm and a width of 66. 2mm, weighing almost 143 grams.
In terms of hardware and OS, Both are powered by a quad core Cortex-A7 processor, but the Gionee Elife E7 Mini has a higher clock speed of 1.7GHz and uses a Mediatek MT6592 chipset with Mali-450MP4 graphics and has 1GB of RAM. It only offers an internal memory of 16GB, which doesn’t support expansion.
The Samsung Grand 2 has its processor clocked at 1.2GHz, but it offers a decent performance in partnership with a Qualcomm MSM8226 Snapdragon 400 chipset and Adreno 305 GPU, being backed by bigger RAM of 1.5GB. The internal memory is cut in half, but you are allowed to add a microSD card and get up to 64GB.
The Elife E7 Mini still runs on Android v4.2.2 (Jelly Bean), while the Grand 2 had v4.3 (Jelly Bean) installed on it and was upgraded to v4.4.2 (KitKat).
For the battery and camera specs, the Gionee Elife E7 Mini has a non-removable battery at 2200mAh, supporting 17 hours of talk time, while the Samsung Grand 2 has a 2600mAh user replaceable battery which offers 3 extra hours of talking time.
Gionee model has the rotating camera with a resolution of 13MP, which can take great selfies with or without using the LED flash feature. However, there are also other features than can increase the quality of the pictures: autofocus, touch focus, face and smile detection, panorama or geo-tagging. The video capture is 1080p, which is also supported by Grand 2’s 8MP back camera. It has similar features, a lower resolution doesn’t affect much the photos, and video calls using a 1.9MP front camera.
The Gionee Elife E7 Mini cost $260, while the Samsung Galaxy Grand 2 is around $250.
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