Chinese smartphone maker, Gionee had recently rolled out a new software update for the Gionee A1, which added support for group selfies. However, the same update is bringing the Airtel VoLTE support for Gionee A1. Airtel is working on the VoLTE feature for quite some time now and recently confirmed that the service would be launched by the end of the year.
One of our reader Kaushik is a user of the Gionee A1 smartphone, and he received the latest update. Surprisingly, Gionee has listed the 'Airtel VoLTE feature' addition in the changelog screen of the upgrade, but not in the media release or elsewhere.
At an event recently in New Delhi, Gopal Mittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel stated as follows “Our Voice over LTE is in the works. We are currently doing trials in five cities … we have done some testing. At some stage towards the later part of the year, we should be able to take VoLTE everywhere."
It's no surprise that Airtel is preparing for the commercial rollout of VoLTE service in India. Gopal, however, did not reveal the list of five cities where they are conducting the trails.
Aside from the Gionee, in recent times, some other smartphone vendors also added the Airtel VoLTE feature to their phones. For the unaware, Xiaomi's Redmi Note 4 recently got the feature, while Apple iPhone carrier page revealed that Airtel supports VoLTE in India.
Airtel confirmed the commercial roll out by the end of the year but did not provide and estimated month or date for the possible launch. Besides the VoLTE support, the latest update for the Gionee A1 brought Panoramic Selfies, which is also called as 'Group Selfies,' and updates the device to latest security patch.
And the 16MP front-facing camera of Gionee A1 can now record videos at Full HD resolution. And all the inbuilt bloatware apps such as UC Browser, Xender, Gstore, and Mood Wallpaper have been updated to their latest version. Lastly, Gionee has fixed all the minor bugs with this update and even increased the performance of the device.
