Gionee S8

Mobile World Congress

At Mobile World Congress, Gionee has unveiled its flagship for 2016, the S8. The phone offers an all-metallic design, which the vendor calls "loop full-metal design."

As for the hardware on offer, the Gionee S8 features a 5.5-inch Full HD AMOLED display, MediaTek's octa-core Helio P10 SoC, 4GB of RAM, 64GB internal memory, 16MP camera with PDAF as well as a laser autofocus system, LTE Category 6 connectivity, and a 3000mAh battery with fast charge. The home button at the front houses a fingerprint sensor.

Gionee's offering Force Touch, with functionality similar to what you'll find on the iPhone 6s. The feature works with Gionee's stock apps at launch, and the vendor is working to increase functionality over the coming months.

The S8 is also the first phone to run Gionee's latest OS, Amigo 3.2, based on Marshmallow. The vendor's global SIM roaming service, which made its debut with the Marathon M5 Plus, is now baked into the OS.

The camera app's navigation has been simplified, giving you quick access to filters and shooting modes. There's OCR as well, with any scanned text automatically converted to a document. The S8 is also adding filters to videos, offering seven different filters with live preview at launch. You also get a video editor to quickly tweak your videos directly from the device.

The Gionee S8 is priced at 449 Euro, with the device set to go on sale from the end of March. It is certainly interesting to see the vendor make the switch to an all-metallic chassis, as well as Marshmallow on the software side of things. We'll have more to share on Gionee's flagship in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned.