For those unaware of the vast and bewildering world of Chinese smartphones, Gionee is one of the popular smartphone brands from the People’s Republic and sells smartphones under its well-known ‘Marathon’ sub-brand of handsets. Many of which feature high-capacity batteries. The company opened shop in India last year, and back in November, launched the Gionee Marathon M5 in the country, after having already launched it in its home country earlier in the year. Subsequent to the launch of the full-sized Marathon M5 in India, the company introduced the Marathon M5 Lite in the country, which is a slightly smaller, more affordable version of the original M5, and comes with a lower price-tag than its larger sibling as well. Now, the company has reportedly launched a new version of the smartphone for customers in Nigeria.
Coming to the device, it is dubbed the Marathon M5 Mini, and comes with hardware specs that are remarkably similar to the M5 Lite that was launched in India earlier this month. The only difference seems to be the amount of RAM and built-in storage, seeing as the latest device from Gionee sports only 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of internal storage, whereas the ‘Lite’ variant that was launched in India comes with 3 GB of RAM and 32 GB of internal storage. Both models, however, have microSD card slots for capacity expansion, and most importantly, staying true to its Marathon branding, the device carries a 4,000 mAh battery. The phone has been launched in only one color – Gold – by the looks of it, and the company is yet to officially announce the price-tag.
As for the rest of the hardware specs, the smartphone features a 5-inch IPS display with a pixel resolution of 1280 x 720. The handset is powered by a MediaTek MT6735 SoC that comes with an integrated quad-core 64-bit processor clocked at 1.3 GHz, along with the Mali-T720 GPU. The device comes with Android 5.1 pre-installed, with an Amigo UI 3.1 overlay. The Marathon M5 Mini sports an 8-megapixel camera on the rear and a 5-megapixel camera on the front. The devices comes with dual SIM connectivity, with support for LTE, HSPA+, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and USB OTG.