Chinese smartphone manufacturer Gionee appears to be developing its own full-screen smartphone following the current market trend, and recently a couple of live photos depicting the alleged front panel of the device emerged through the Chinese social network Weibo. As expected, the panel has thin bezels at the top and bottom, and considerably thinner side edges, which should result in a relatively high screen-to-body ratio. The lower bezel bears the company’s brand and the upper bezel seems to accommodate an earpiece alongside two sensors.
The glass panels spotted in these leaked images seem to share the same design presented by recently leaked teaser renders, complete with the two aforementioned sensor cutouts and speaker grills. This lends more credibility to the validity of these photos, whose source claims that the panels belong to the unannounced Gionee M7, and have been photographed somewhere along the supply chain. The source claims that these panels should cover an AMOLED display acquired from Samsung, adding that Gionee will be among the very few Samsung customers to have access to these screens because they are currently in short supply. Samsung is the world’s largest AMOLED panel supplier, however, these alleged supply shortages may be attributed to the fact that the latest Apple iPhone X is utilizing a Samsung-made OLED panel for the first time in the smartphone series’ history.
No other details have been revealed by the source, but previous rumors indicate that the Gionee M7 could sport a 6-inch display and a MediaTek MT6757CD Helio P25 chipset coupled with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of on-board memory. The device should be a direct successor to the Gionee M6 released in September 2016, which is equipped with a 5.5-inch AMOLED panel bearing a resolution of 1920 x 1080, and a MediaTek Helio P10 system-on-chip housing an octa-core ARM Cortex-A53-based processor, a Mali-T860MP2 graphics chip, and 4GB of RAM. Other recent rumors indicate that the Chinese OEM is also working on a second variant called the Gionee M7 Power, which will likely carry a 6-inch display with a resolution of 2160 x 1080, according to recent benchmark listings. Both models are expected to be officially announced before the end of the year.