by Hisense has had a busy year, though much of its focus has been on the home electronics front. 2016 has seen the company launch its much-loved Infinity KO phone, which Hisense calls “life proof”. This thanks to its water- and shock-proof design. The KO showed a clear move, by the Chinese company, towards showcasing improved hardware design in their mobile products. Since its entry into the local smartphone market in 2013, Hisense has always focused on offering customers value for money, ensuring that they pair price and performance into one seamless package.
The Chinese company is now going one step further with the introduction of two new devices – the 4G enabled Elegance and Faith.
Feature Rich
According to Hisense, both the Elegance and Faith are designed for “performance and style”, which clearly means that the company is looking at taking aim at the fashion-conscious consumer. With this in mind, Hisense has utilised a beautifully-rendered, sandblastedm aluminium design to ensure that they are not only lightweight, but strong.
While aesthetics are important in a smartphone, it’s not the only thing that matters. Hisense has embedded a number of noteworthy technologies in these two phones to ensure that the brains match up to the beauty level. Both the Elegance and Faith include fingerprint recognition, the first Hisense phones in South Africa to carry this feature. The phones cater for up to five different fingers, unlocking either device in 0.5 seconds. This biometric system is linked to Hisense’s Vision UI 3.0 (based on Android Marshmallow 6.0) applications. These include email, contacts and the photo gallery, ensuring security throughout the devices.
Both handsets also include a data-saving mode, which allows you to save up to 50% more data while streaming content. This without compromising the quality of the video.
Sizing Up
The Elegance is the larger of the two devices, boasting a 5.5-inch Full 1080p HD display with 400 pixels per inch (ppi). The Faith might be slightly smaller with its 5-inch screen, but still commands HD visuals and 294 ppi. Although different in size, the Elegance and Faith have quite similar specs. Both models feature a 13MP camera on the back, as well as a 5MP front-facing one for the avid selfie-taker.
Hisense has imbued the devices with a number of different shooting modes, including a 0.1 millisecond shutter speed. The result is that the Elegance and Faith handsets can cater for light trail and water effects, along with a beauty, night, professional and HDR mode. This is ideal for users who want to put their photography skills to the test.
Both models are powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1.4GHz octa-core processor. The difference between the two, however, is that the larger Elegance has 3GB RAM with 32GB of on-board storage, while the Faith has 2GB RAM and 16GB on-board storage. Both devices have a microSD slot that can cater for up to 128GB of additional memory, while the slot also doubles as a second SIM (4G) slot.
Another noteworthy element of the Elegance and Faith is battery life Each handset utilises 3000 mAh and 2500 mAh units respectively.
According to Hisense, both devices can deliver up to one and a half days’ worth of battery life (with average use). Added to this is an Ultra power-saving mode, which kicks in when the battery hits 15%. The mode closes any unnecessary applications and leaves only the phone, contact and messaging features, of both devices, operational.
Coming soon
These two handsets are available from Game stores, Dion Wired, the Foschini Group stores, all the Edcon Group outlets nationwide, as well as selected online retailers.
The recommended retail price for the Elegance is R3 999 and the Faith is R2 999.
Both devices also come with Hisense’s new 24 month warranty.
