Gionee Plays Up Phablet With 7,000 mAh Battery

Only a tease-view yet. But a plausible one at that.

Gionee recently teased the world with a soft announcement through social networking website Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter), about a smartphone dubbed as the M2017, that apparently carries a gargantuan 7,000 mAh battery.

The 7,000 mAh battery capacity is almost as big, if not bigger, than most upper-end external power banks used by consumers these days. Just as a point of comparison, Apple’s iPad Mini 4 has a battery that is rated at ‘only’ 5,124 mAh!

As per the initial leaks, the M2017 is expected to be manufactured using a svelte finish and will feature a dual-rear camera setup consisting of a 12 megapixel mated with a 13 megapixel sensor at the back. On the front, there’s supposedly an 8 megapixel camera.

As far as other specifications of the device are concerned, the phone is likely to run on Android 6.0 Marshmallow, with the high probability that the phone will soon update to Android Nougat within the next few months.

Coming back to the USP of this phone — the 7,000 mAh battery, it forced us at Chip-Monks to ask a couple of questions: Do we really need such gigantic amounts of battery in our smartphones? Is it really a case of the bigger the battery, the better?

The answer seems to be in the affirmative — across most user types. Gamers these days, are shifting from PCs to smartphones. Professionals rely on their phone for almost everything cursory, and are on their phones almost as long as they are awake and coherent.
Field force, home-makers, freelancers, even photographers are all fed by not only their primary uses (whatever those be), but also many new uses that are interestingly, triggered, festered and fed by these devices themselves!

Consequently, a mobile device is a 24x7 appendage, with a myriad of requirements; so the device must keep up. And no matter who the manufacturer is, and how optimised the device and its operating system be, somehow the device finds the bottom end of the battery more and more often these days.

Hence, clearly, there is a need for a competent battery. The larger the better… provided the device doesn’t weigh as much as a lead ball, nor take 9 years to tank up on energy.

Gionee’s last battery-oriented smartphones, Marathon M5 and M6 Plus were released with massive 6,020 mAh batteries; so clearly, Gionee knows how to shoehorn Lithium-Ion into lithe forms. Thence, the M2017’s 7,000 mAh battery is a very clear possibility.

Since it houses that massive a battery, most users might think that it will be a mammoth device with considerable weight to boot. Thankfully, that’s not the case with the M2017.

The phone measures 155.2x77.6x10.6mm, and weighs around 230 grams. This is indeed passable for a smartphone that carries a huge battery. Yet, when compared to phablets like iPhone 7 Plus (at 188 grams) and Samsung Galaxy S7 edge (at 157 grams), the M2017 does appears to be bulky.
That said, the weight balance and distribution in-hand will determine how comfortable the device actually is, and that will in turn, determine it’s fate in the marketplace.

Based on the information extracted from TENAA certification, the Gionee M2017 will supposedly be sporting a 5.7-inch quad-HD display, MediaTek Helio P10 processor coupled with 6 GB RAM and offer 128 GB of internal storage. The device runs at 1.95 GHz, which is a surprise, because it’s seems a little underpowered when compared to other competing smartphones being launched these days.

In the teaser image shared by Gionee, the focus is primarily on the Chinese actress Xu Fan and director Feng Xiaogang with Feng holding a device quite like the rumoured M2017 in his left hand. This teaser lends a sense of credibility to the news that a device like M2017 on the anvil of a public launch in the near future.

Now if all the specs are taken into account, then the price of the device can be speculated to be somewhere around USD 499 (INR 33,895). However, it is important to keep in mind that at the time of writing this, there are no official confirmations about the launch date or the price and specs of the M2017. Since all we have yet is only a teaser, and an alleged one at that, be ready to wait awhile to hold this device in your own hands.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.