Gionee hasn’t exactly launched a ton of smartphones this year, but they did release a couple of interesting models. The company’s Elife E8 flagship phablet is certainly interesting, as is the big battery Marathon M5 mid-ranger which was launched alongside the E8 earlier this year. That being said, the company has announced the Marathon M5 Lite quite recently, and has been teasing the announcement of the Marathon M5 Plus for quite some time now. The company did say that the phone will be announced on December 21st, and they’ve just released this phablet, read on.
The Marathon M5 Plus is made out of metal, and it sports a physical home button below the display, a button which also doubles as a fingerprint scanner. The device features a 6-inch 1080p (1920 x 1080) AMOLED display along with 3GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage (expandable via a microSD card). One of the main selling points of the Marathon M5 Plus is its battery, no doubt about it. This phone actually sports a 5,020mAH battery on the inside, which is a somewhat smaller unit than the 6,020mAh (2 x 3,010mAh) one which you can find in the original Marathon M5. The phone is fueled by MediaTek’s MT6753 64-bit octa-core processor running at 1.3GHz, and 4G LTE connectivity is also available here, as are two SIM card slots. The Marathon M5 Plus ships with Android 5.1 Lollipop pre-installed with Gionee’s Amigo 3.1 UI on top of it. Speaking of software, this UI brings along a number of additions / apps from Gionee, like the AmiClone, Gionee Mailbox, Ami Locker and Child Clone.
The GIonee Marathon M5 Plus is priced at 2,499 Yuan ($385) in China, which doesn’t exactly make it the most affordable handset out on the market, but the 6-inch phablets with great battery life are limited, especially affordable ones. This price point is not that high, in all honesty, and you do get a rather beefy battery on the inside, and a premium build device. Now, it’s up to you to determine whether these specs are enough for you, and whether you like Gionee’s design, both in terms of software and hardware. The phone will be available starting from Christmas in China, and the company did not say whether / when will this handset be available outside of Gionee’s homeland.
