Battery life was never a problem back in the pre-smartphone era, but ever since we became slaves to touchscreens, we have become wall-huggers. With smartphone display resolutions increasing, powerful CPUs coming into play we have become accustomed to carry battery packs with us or become wall-huggers.
Manufacturers like Lenovo with their P1 and P1m and Asus with their Zenfone Max. Gionee came up with the Gionee Marathon M5 with a 6020 mAh battery- is it the ultimate solution to your battery issues? We are here to find out.
Build and Design
With two 3010 mAh batteries inside one phone resulting in a battery capacity of 6020 mAh one would assume that the smartphone would be bulky, and that’s the case here. Weighing in at 211 grams, the device is really heavy but is not really thick at just 8.63 mm. The M5 is using a metal frame and has got a nice design and premium body with a metallic finish. It is available in Black, White and Gold colour options. Build quality is top notch. There are shiny gold border on the sides and matte gold finish all around the phone.
The device comes with dual sim support and both sim slots are capable of supporting 4G LTE networks. There is an IR blaster included and you can the Peel Remote app to control IR-capable devices like TVs, Air conditioners, DTH box etc. There is 32 GB of internal storage with support for microSD card upto 128 gigs.
Performance
The Marathon M5 is powered by the Mediatek MT6735 64 bit CPU with 3 GB of RAM. It runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop out of the box with a layer of Gionee’s custom user interface called Amigo 3.1.
General usage is really good. We didn’t encounter any noticeable lag or stutter during our usage, and swiping through the interface was very fluid for the most part. The phone handles demanding games surprisingly well, and there was barely any hiccup in performance.
Display
The smartphone comes with a 5.5 inch AMOLED screen with 1280 x 720 pixels resolution. Colour reproduction is really good and it’s quite vivid. It’s no Full HD but that was probably done for the great battery backup this device has. It even comes with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection.
Camera
There is 13MP camera sensor on the rear with LED flash and a 5MP front selfie camera. The rear camera quality produces some nice looking shots in good lighting but in low light the camera struggles a lot.The camera app has a Pro mode which allows for manual control that will be helpful for camera freaks.
The rear camera can also shoot Full HD 1080pvideos which sometimes struggles to focus with movement.
The 5 megapixel selfie camera does a decent job capturing good details in the pictures and there is a beauty mode in the app too.
Battery
The battery life is extremely superb. For power management, the M5 comes with usual power saving modes – Normal mode, which reduces the performance and adds a Dark theme which you can change, and then Extreme mode, which keeps the basic functionalities – phone, contacts, messaging and clock – running. We were able to stretch this phone’s battery life up to two days which out of which 4 hours included playing battery consuming game titles like Shadowgun Deadzone, 3 hours of video streaming on Youtube, 2 hours of social media and in short it was easily able to go through two days with about 14 hours of Screen on time.
This device even with really heavy usage can last you upto two days and if you use the Extreme mode sometimes, then you can even extend your usage to 3 days and that is really impressive. But the huge battery takes about half day to fully charge as there is no quick charge support. The phone can also act as a power bank and be used to charge some other phone but there is no OTG cable included in the box.
Verdict
The Marathon M5 is a good option for those who are looking for a smartphone that gives great battery along with a decent camera, premium design and a nice display. But the device is quite heavy. The Marathon M5 continues to face competition from Lenovo’s Vibe P1 – that itself offers tremendous battery life with its 4900 mAh battery and offers addition like a fingerprint scanner and quick charging.
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