The Gionee Marathon M5 is a mid range Android smartphone with a difference. It uses a 5.5-inch AMOLED panel of 720p resolution, which is in itself nothing special. It’s powered by a MediaTek MT6735, quad core, 64-bit processor clocked at up to 1.3 GHz and backed up by 2 GB of RAM. There’s 16 GB of internal storage plus a MicroSD card, a 13MP rear camera and 5MP front facing camera. The M5 comes with dual-SIM slots and 4G LTE connectivity and to batteries offering a total of over 6,000 mAh of battery capacity, which the company say can give four days of battery life – hence the word “Marathon” slotted into the device’s name! The device is available in three colors, these being Black, White and Gold.
The M5 is powered by Android 5.1 Lollipop running over Gionee’s Amigo OS interface. Android Lollipop supports 64-bit code, which allows the Gionee M5’s MediaTek processor to stretch its 64-bit legs. The MT6735 is supported by ARM’s Mali-T720 GPU, which supports resolutions of up to 1080. The processor side of things is based on the ARM Cortex-A53 processor code and in back to back tests with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 (which may be clocked at up to 1.2 GHz and contains the Adreno 306 GPU) the MediaTek System-on-Chip outperformed the Qualcomm SoC. Now of course, many customers looking at buying the M5 will be buying it for different reasons other than it ability to outperform the competition, but a higher performance SoC makes the M5 an easier device to live with, day by day.
We’ve now seen the Gionee Marathon M5 subjected to a number of benchmarks and there’s a gallery at the bottom of the article showing these results. Of the tests, the PCMark score is perhaps the most interesting because at 3,555, the M5 slots almost half way between the low 3,000s that devices based around the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 SoC with a 720p resolution screen see, such as the Vodafone Smart prime 6, and the low 4,000s that devices based around the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 score, equipped with a 1080p display (the HTC One M8). The Gionee also scored exactly 28,000 points on the AnTuTu benchmark app, 3,198 points on the Ice Store Extreme 3DMark test. Benchmarking application Vellamo showed 905 points on the Metal test, 1,457 points for the Multi-Core test and 2,278 points on the Browser test. And these figures point towards the Gionee Marathon M5 as being a credible performer. It’s definitely a mid-range smartphone when it comes to the performance, but this power efficient hardware setup mated with two high capacity batteries should give the device superb battery up time.
