Gionee launched its Marathon M5 Plus in China back in December 2015, and now the company has decided to roll out the Marathon M5 Plus in Indian market. It has arrived in Indian market today and it is priced at INR 26,999. One of the major highlight of this phone is its heavy 5020 mAh battery which is a common trait in all the Marathon M series phones. Other than this, it comes with a fingerprint sensor on board, full HD AMOLED display and has decent set of specs.
We have unboxed the Marathon M5 Plus soon after its launch and here is a sum up of our quick overview about the device.
Gionee Marathon M5 Plus Full Specifications
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Gionee Marathon M5 Plus Unboxing and Quick Review [Video]
Gionee Marathon M5 Plus Unboxing
The big Marathon M5 Plus comes packed in a brick shaped box, that looks bigger than the usual boxes. You will find the Gionee branding on the top with the picture of the phone.
At the bottom you will find the manufacturing and device details with key specs. Opening the box is pretty normal, take off the lid and you will see the handset resting on the top and the bunch of accessories are placed neatly below this compartment.
Gionee Marathon M5 Plus Box Contents
It comes with the following contents in the box:
- Marathon M5 Plus handset
- SIM ejector
- 2 pin charger
- USB Type-C cable
- Protective cover
- Protective screen guard
- In-ear headphones
- Documentations
Gionee Marathon M5 Plus Physical Overview
Marathon M5 Plus looks almost similar to the Marathon M5 and M5 Lite, the only difference is in the display size. It comes with a huge 6 inch display that makes it very obvious that using it with one hand will not be easy. It packs a 5020 mAh battery and that makes it 211 grams, and still it manages to look sleek and stylish.
It has a beautiful 2.5D curve glass on the front followed by a thin shiny border which adds a smooth curve on the corners. The sides are made out of metal with chamfered edges and have a flat aluminum back with slight curve on the sides. The top and bottom part of the back is made of plastic. The build quality is good and it feels really solid to hold, but the design language is not very interesting to look at.
The front top has the earpiece in the center, proximity sensor and ambient light sensor along with the front camera. The front camera is placed on the extreme right of the top bezel.
The home button and capacitive navigation keys are on the bottom. The navigation keys are not backlit and the home button has the fingerprint sensor built inside.
Power/Lock button, volume rocker and micro SIM tray is placed on the right side of the phone.
On the left, you’ll find a SIM tray which accepts one SIM and a microSD card.
USB Type-C port, 3.5 mm audio jack and secondary microphone is at the bottom of the phone.
On the top of the back panel, there a good looking camera module with chrome linings on its side and the LED flash is located right below it with a small microphone hole is placed in between.
Loudspeaker grill is placed on the bottom of the back panel.
Gionee Marathon M5 Plus Photo Gallery
Marathon M5 Plus User Interface
Gionee Marathon M5 Plus comes with Amigo 3.1 OS that runs on top of Android 5.1 Lollipop. It includes a new app locker, better mailbox and an all new kids mode to keep your phone safe from children. It has a different icon pack, totally revamped settings menu and notification and shortcut panels.
It is totally different from the stock Android experience but still doesn’t feel uncomfortable in using. The animations and transitions were smooth, and I liked the overall UI experience if compared to several other custom user interfaces.
Marathon M5 Plus Camera Performance
For the camera Gionee went in with a 13 MP primary sensor having f/2.2 aperture. It comes with a dual LED setup and a 5 MP unit up front for selfies. It has PDAF ( phase detection autofocus) which makes it quicker to focus on objects. As far as the picture quality is concerned, it was able to capture good amount of details and colours in the day light images, but not that great in low light scenario. The AMOLED display enhances the picture quality even more when you preview it on its display.
For more details about the picture quality, you can see the camera samples in the gallery below.
Camera Samples
Marathon M5 Plus Gaming Performance
Gionee Marathon M5 Plus has Mediatek MT6753 processor which is considered to be just about average these days. It has 3 GB of RAM and Mali-T720MP3 GPU, and this configuration is good enough to get through games like Asphalt 8. I played Modern Combat 5 on this smartphone to test the graphic performance, and I was satisfied with the performance. The gameplay was smooth and buttery even with high level graphics, but you may have to face few glitches in between the game play. The minor frame drops were occurring once in 2 minutes but it was not affecting the game. Games like Nova 3 may struggle a bit with high graphic levels, but will be playable at medium level graphics.
The phone started heating after 20 minutes of continuous gaming but it was not unbearable. I was testing it in an air conditioned room that helped it keeping cool but the battery temperature still reached above 36 degrees after 30 minutes.
I played Modern Combat 5 for 30 minutes and it consumed 8% of the battery and the temperature rose from 30.6 degree Celsius to 35.2 degree Celsius.
Benchmark Scores
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Conclusion
Gionee Marathon M5 is the elder sibling of the M5 and M5 Lite, and it has new hardware riding under the shell. Fingerprint sensor is a much needed upgrade and also the USB Type-C port. The upgraded software and hardware works in favor for this phone. Anyone who needs a phone with ample of juice, decent camera, enough raw power to run high end games and a beautiful display can definitely consider this smartphone.
