Many of us are familiar with smartphones that arrive with dual SIM slots, and more often than not, a ‘sacrifice’ must be made. The first SIM slot is normally meant for your SIM card, while the other is a toss up between stashing another microSD memory card for memory expansion purposes, or to simply throw in a different SIM -- perhaps your business one. Majority of Chinese smartphone manufacturers have taken this dual SIM route to date, making it more or less a staple feature, and the all-new Gionee M2017 would like to make things even more interesting for the year to come by offering a dual battery configuration.

I know, right? It does sound pretty weird, having two batteries in a single handset. As though the thought of exploding batteries have not haunted us enough already to date, especially with some of the dodgy third party replacement batteries that we can find online. To hear that the Gionee M2017 sports not one, but two batteries underneath the hood? That is certainly worth exploring, especially when the combined power of the batteries are able to deliver a whopping 7,000mAh of battery life, far more than what most of our regular handsets are able to deliver these days, save for a few such as the Oukitel K10000 that purportedly sports a 10,000mAh battery life, with the Oukitel K6000 coming in rather close with a 6,000mAh battery life rating. No surprises then that both Oukitel handsets are also from a China manufacturer.

Well, the Gionee M2017 with its dual battery configuration will not come cheap, that is for sure. In terms of its hardware specifications, the Gionee M2017 will sport a 5.7-inch QHD AMOLED display that has curved edges on either side, which makes one wonder whether they did this on purpose after taking a look at the Korean-made Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. In order to keep up with the times, the Gionee M2017 will also come with a fingerprint sensor that is located in front and capacitive navigation support, clearly having the the upper mid-range market in mind.

Other hardware specifications of the Gionee M2017 include an octa-core Snapdragon 653 processor, up to 6GB of RAM that will be accompanied by a whopping 256GB of internal memory. For those who would like the same processor from Qualcomm but with less RAM at 4GB, then the amount of internal memory is halved -- to 128GB. Android 6.0 Marshmallow is the operating system of choice, except that it will have Gionee’s Amigo UI version 3.5 running on top of it. With two 3,500 mAh batteries thrown into the mix, both of them are able to juice up through Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 via the USB-C port. The Gionee M2017 is basically a China-only device with an asking price of $1,000 thereabouts after conversion -- making it one heck of an expensive handset. I think most people would rather go for something far safer and more reliable, such as a high end iPhone 7 Plus or the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, accompanied by a sizeable power bank for mobile charging purposes.