Gionee Elife E8 is official: quad-HD display, 2 GHz octa-core SoC and a 24MP rear shooter for $645

At a special event today, Gionee has taken the wraps off two new handsets, each with very different agendas. Where the Marathon M5 is focused on battery life, the flagship Elife E8 is all about the bells and whistles, and if you're looking for a beastly new smartphone, the E8 has a good crack at ticking all of the boxes. 

First and foremost, there's a 6-inch, quad-HD AMOLED display, which boasts a crisp 490 ppi pixel density. MediaTek's quad-core Helio X10 processor resides under the hood boasting a maximum clock speed of 2 GHz, and is allied to a substantial 3 GB of RAM. The Elife E8 also includes 64 GB of storage, expandable by means of its microSD slot, but where the processor is mouth-watering on paper, the camera is arguably the marquee feature here. 

With a 23.7-megapixel camera, the Elife E8's shooter is behind only Nokia's 808 PureView and Lumia 1020 in the megapixel count. Sure, this doesn't always tell the full story, but with the E8 including software that can allow the camera to produce images of up to a 100-megapixel resolution, photography something that Gionee has clearly focused its attention on here. The camera app is said to launch at light-speed -- in just 0.8 seconds, and also offers super-quick phase detection autofocus. The sapphire glass-shielded six-element lens is accompanied by optical image stabilization, True Tone LED flash and 4K video recording. It also includes lossless zoom, which is a first for an Android smartphone.

Where the Marathon M5, with its mid-range specs, tips the price scale at $370, those in the market for the Elife E8 will naturally require deeper pockets. At the equivalent of $645, it's at the premium end of the spectrum, but as the specs suggest, you get plenty of bang for your buck.

The Gionee Elife E8 will be available from July 15th, and as we learned a short while back, will retail as the Allview X2 Xtreme in some regions.

source: PRNewswire via GSMArena