Review: smartphone with four cameras, the Gionee S10 takes well-lit photos and has excellent battery life, but is nothing special
A solid performer with a heavily skinned version of Android, this Chinese-made handset is marketed for the quality of its photo effects, but they’re a letdown - leaving you a mid-tier phone with no standout attributes
As if having a 20-megapixel front camera in its A1 Plus smartphone wasn’t far enough over the top, Gionee is doubling down on the idea (of vanity) with this its new handset, the S10, which has two high-resolution selfie cameras.
Gionee is billing this as the world’s first four-camera smartphone (there are two on the back as well). Aside from the fact that Alcatel and another Chinese manufacturer, Oukitel, beat Gionee to the punch with the launch of four-camera smartphones this spring, do we really need a phone with this many cameras?
Design and hardware
The Gionee S10 is a well-built metal unibody phone with a 20-megapixel camera on the front and a 16-megapixel shooter on the back, and both are flanked by a secondary, 8-megapixel lens that does two jobs: soak up more lighting so photos can appear brighter, and decipher the distance between subject and background in order to produce “bokeh” effect shots (both tricks were pioneered by Huawei with its P9 smartphone, a few months before the iPhone 7 Plus hit the market).
