Gionee, one of China's leading smartphone manufacturers, recently underwent a makeover and now owns a brand new logo with a catchy tagline -Make Smiles.
And the first product to get launched under new branding was Gionee Marathon M5 Plus. The devices carry forward the legacy of Marathon-series and sport a large battery, but in the new Marathon M5 Plus, this feature is rather small.
This makes us wonder if it's a genuine attempt from Gionee. Will the Marathon M5 Plus succeed in surpassing its predecessors? Let's find out.
Look and feel
Gionee Marathon M5 Plus sports a metal frame, but it isn't as sturdy as expected. The M5 Plus is 8.4mm thick and weighs 211g. It has 6-inch full-HD (1080x1920-pixel) Amoled display with 2.5D curved glass. With its high resolution, it offers laser sharp pictures and texts.
The device offers a fairly bright display and the color reproduction is also very good. M5 Plus' sunlight legibility is upright. It's priced above Rs.25, 000 in Indian market but at this hefty price, the device surely lacks a few features here and there such as Corning Gorilla Glass and Asahi glass.
It has a fingerprint scanner embedded into home button and can be reached out easily when the phone is operated with one hand. The device features a dual-SIM tray on the left side, whereas the microSD card tray is at the right.
Specifications and software
Marathon M5 was at first shipped with a quad-core MediaTek MT6735 SoC, but now there's an upgrade to it. It is now backed by an octa-core MediaTek MT6753 processor which is clocked at 1.3GHz, and has 3GB of RAM. The device features 64GB of onboard storage expandable up to 128GB using a microSD card.
It runs Amigo 3.1 skin on top of Android 5.1 Lollipop. There are no toggle switches in the dropdown notifications shade because of which one has to swipe upwards on any screen for quick shortcuts to airplane mode, cellular data, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, screen rotation, GPS, vibration, sound profile, and battery mode settings.
Marathon M5 Plus comes pre-loaded with apps from Gionee like Theme Park which gives you the option of customizing the interface. In all, its interface does appear a bit cluttered.
Performance
A higher RAM is what makes the best part of Marathon M5 Plus, which prevents the smartphone from any kind of lag.
Irrespective of the fact that it has dozens of apps opened in the background, M5 lags nowhere. The device offers no trouble in terms of speed, shuffling between apps and playing games. The music player also showcases a decent performance and the earphones as shipped along surely do a great job.
Coming to the device's camera, Marathon M5 Plus has 13MP autofocus rear camera and 5MP fixed-focus front camera. Its Camera app launches very quickly and gives you many tweaking options such as Face Beauty, which offers blemish free clicks, shoots numerous frames to form an animation. Its rear camera takes decent pictures with precise colors but you'll find over-saturation in well-lit images and the grainy ones in low light. As for the selfie camera, it takes good pictures on under good light.
Battery life
Marathon M5 Plus has 5020mAh battery which can last for 21 hours and 52 minutes even while playing non-stop videos. One can assume that under normal use, the battery would last for nearly 3 days.
The device comes with USB Type-C port which allows the device to be charged faster than the previous versions.
Verdict
At the price of Rs. 26,999, Gionee Marathon M5 Plus shows some hints of betterment than the earlier released M5. Though the battery is bit small but then the device offers other standout features like fingerprint reader and USB Type-C port.
But if compared to OnePlus 3 and Xiaomi Mi 5, which share the same price as Marathon M5 Plus – the latter does appear to be lagging behind.
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