Gionee is a China-based company which became quite popular when they introduced the Elife S5.1 handset back in September 2014. That device is only 5.2mm thick, and was the world’s thinnest smartphone at the time. Gionee has introduced a number of devices since then, including their Elife E8 flagship phablet and a couple of ‘Marahon’ devices. The Marathon M5, Marathon M5 Plus and Marathon M5 Lite were all announced last year, and all of those phones are currently available in China.
That being said, Gionee tends to release their devices to the Indian smartphone market as well, and that is exactly what happened in Marathon M5 Lite’s case. The company has introduced this phone to the Indian smartphone market, the Marathon M5 Lite is now available through offline stores in India. The phone comes in Gold color option only, and it is available for Rs. 12,999 ($195) in the country. The main selling point of the Marathon M5 Lite is its battery, this smartphone packs in a 4,000mAh unit on the inside, which is significantly smaller than the 6,000mAh battery you’ll find in the Marathon M5, but is still quite big.
The Marathon M5 Lite features a 5-inch 720p (1280 x 720) IPS display along with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage (expandable via a microSD card). Now, keep in mind that the Chinese variant of this phone offers only 1GB of RAM and 16GB of native storage, so this is basically a significantly more powerful variant. This handset is fueled by MediaTek’s MT6735 64-bit quad-core SoC running at 1.3GHz, and a 4,000mAh battery is available on the inside. The 8-megapixel shooter can be found on the back of this smartphone, and a 5-megapixel snapper is available up front. Android 5.1 Lollipop comes pre-installed here with Gionee’s Amigo 3.1 UI on top of it. The phone measures 143 x 69.9 x 8.5mm, while it weighs 182 grams. As far as the design is concerned, the phone sports three capacitive buttons below the display, and offers a rear-facing speaker. You’ll get a far better idea of how it looks if you check out the gallery down below.
