Gionee is all set to launch the latest of its big-battery smartphones in India – the Marathon 5 in tie-up with Flipkart at a price of Rs 17,999.
The CDMA-GSM phone represents an option for those looking for a model with decent battery life.
The predecessor model — Marathon 4 — has seen decent sales in the country thanks to its 5 Ah battery. That device is selling at Rs 13,000 as well.
The new phone goes one up on its predecessor as far as the battery is concerned, packing in a 6 Ah (6020 milli-ampere hour) unit.
The device has special software technology to cut down on power consumption as well.
“AMOLED displays consume less power,” said Arvind R Vohra, head of Gionee in India. The company has also tweaked its operating system to shut down background apps more aggressively.
Altogether, the software optimization has reduced battery consumption by 30%, giving a battery life of 4 days for a normal user and 2 days for heavy users, he added.
“You can get 62 hours of back-up with just 5% of the battery in extreme mode,” Vohra said. 10 minutes of charging will give 75 hours of standby time. Half an hour of charging will give a full-day of charge, he said.
Since the battery is divided into two units of 3010 mAh each, it is safer as well, he added.
The M5 will provide a much better alternative to the Samsung Galaxy J7, which is priced at Rs 15,000.
Both have 5.5-inch AMOLED displays of the same resolution and are priced very close together. The only major difference is in battery back-up and there are not prizes for guessing which one wins in this department.
Flipkart said it has been involved in the development of the product for six months. Flipkart said it is selling 18-20% of all smartphones in India.
Other than that, the Gionee Marathon 5 also offers a 13 MP camera at the back (up from 8 MP on the previous version), while the front camera remains at 5 MP.
RAM and internal memory too are expected to remain the same at 2 and 16 GB respectively.
Disappointingly, the display resolution will continue to be only ‘HD Ready’ (720p) instead of full HD. However, the surface area of the display has been increased by around 20%.
As expected, the display technology will be Super AMOLED, which should provide some relief.
Operating system on the M5 will be Android 5.1 vs 5.0 on the previous version. The phone also comes with an IR-blaster to control TVs and set-top-boxes, DTS speakers and support for 128 GB of microSD card memory.
