Smartphones have been getting slimmer and slimmer over the years, and some of them are even too slim, at least in my opinion. Certain Chinese smartphone OEMs have been raising the ante as far as this goes for quite some time now. Gionee Elife S5.1 was the slimmest device around for quite some time, it was acclaimed as such by Guinness. That device was only 5.31mm thick, which was, at the time, over a millimetre slimmer than the iPhone 6 and Galaxy Alpha for example. Another Chinese OEM, Oppo, decided to de-throne the Elife S5.1 and released the Oppo R5 handset in October 2014 which was 4.85mm thick. Oppo was the king of thin smartphones for a short while though, Vivo released their X5 Max handset soon after which is 4.75mm thick. This device is to date the second thinnest smartphone in the world, Coolpad’s Ivvi K1 Mini is 4.7mm thick and thus the thinnest smartphone around.
Now that we got that out of the way, let’s tackle the latest report. Gionee plans to announce a new smartphone at MWC (Mobile World Congress) in Barcelona next month, the handset will be called the Elife S7 and Gionee will announce it on March 2nd at 2pm (local time). Many people still think that this device will try to trump Coolpad and set a new record, but that won’t be the case. “The race to make the slimmest smartphone was getting out of hand. Going so slim is actually not benefiting user experience without the performance to back it up,” said Oliver Sha, Head of Global Marketing at Gionee. I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Sha, phones have been getting too thin and there are simply too many bad sides to it. Not only are they easy to break, but they can’t support significant batteries on the inside which is of course bad, battery life is one of the biggest problems in today’s handsets, and these device offered subpar battery life.
There you have it, Gionee will announce another device which will be really thin, but not as thin as some people thought. Speaking of which, how thin is your device?