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Gionee breaks the record for world's thinnest smartphone

At just 5.5mm thick, the Chinese company's latest handset, the Elife S5.5, is 0.25mm thinner than the current record holder, the Vivo X3.

Despite its extremely svelte figure, the phone boasts a 5-inch full HD display, an octa-core 1.7GHz processor and 2GB of RAM. It also runs Android version 4. 2 and somehow has enough space for a 13-megapixel camera and image sensor.

But maybe most remarkable of all is that there's sufficient room inside the device for a battery that will power the phone for a full day.

The handset, which is about to be launched in Gionee's native China, is expected to cost roughly $370 when it goes on sale. The company has not revealed if it plans to sell the handset further afield.

It might be hard to believe that there is a subset of phone makers focused entirely on making the slimmest of slimline handsets humanly possible, but over the past 12 months a device war has been raging as companies have attempted to beat the previous record just in order to call their handset the world's thinnest, even if just for a handful of months.

At the start of 2013, Huawei claimed the title thanks to its 6.16mm thick Ascend P6. But during the summer, it was beaten by the Vivo X3 (5.75mm), and now, Gionee's Elife S5.5 has broken the record again.