Gionee Marathon M5 Lite Review: Just another budget smartphone

Chinese smartphone maker Gionee has launched the toned down version of Gionee Marathon M5. To list it out, the Marathon M5 Lite comes with smaller screen, lower resolution rear camera and a smaller battery.

Every other day, we see a bunch of budget smartphones coming to India with good specs. The Gionee Marathon M5 Lite has some serious competition as it also falls in the budget smartphone segment. We review it to find out where it stands.

Design and display
In terms of design, the Gionee M5 Marathon Lite smartphone is very similar to Gionee M5 smartphone. It comes with a regular metallic frame with curved edges. The one we got to review was dressed in gold. As far as port placements are concerned, the 3.5mm headset jack is placed at the top, while the micro-USB port is placed at the bottom.

The Gionee M5 Marathon Lite smartphone comes with a removable back with smooth metallic finish. At the back, users get an 8MP rear camera that sits at the top left corner with the LED flash. The Gionee branding is placed in the middle, while the loudspeaker is placed at the bottom.

Just like its bigger sibling, the front of the smartphone is dominated by a 5.5-inch display. It also houses an earpiece, sensor array and the front camera. Though there are no physical buttons on the front, you still get the soft-touch Home, Back and Task Switcher keys that offer decent feedback. Sadly, these haptic keys are not backlit, so identifying their location in the dark is a bit of a problem.

The smartphone comes with a 5-inch HD display with 720x1,280p display resolution at 294ppi. This is a bit of a let down as the budget segment has plenty of smartphones that support Full HD resolution, such as Lenovo K4 Note and the new LeEco 1S. Otherwise, the phone has good sunlight readability with slightly reflective panel.

Performance and Camera
The key specs of the phone include:

Memory: 32GB non-expandable OS: Android OS, v5.1 (Lollipop) CPU: 1.3GHz quad-core Cortex-A53 processor GPU: Mali-T720MP2 RAM: 3GB RAM Connectivity options: 4G, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth v4.1 and GPS Battery: 4,000mAh

Looking at the overall specs, the RAM and battery seem to be the high points of the Gionee Marathon M5 Lite. The rest of the specs are pretty standard for a budget smartphone.



In terms of performance, we did not encounter any issues in our time with the smartphone. It was responsive and smooth while opening and switching between apps or playing casual games.

The call quality, even in weak reception areas, was good. It also offers FM radio. We were able to play most popular video and audio file formats with ease. The sound output through the phone's speaker outlet was loud and offers good sound quality. Gionee Marathon M5 Lite also offers good gaming performance. We were able to play games like Asphalt 8 and free flow without encountering frame drops or freezes.

On the battery front, the smartphone comes with a non-removable 4,000mAh battery. It can last up to a day and half easily with moderate usage, but if you are a heavy user, you will get only one day of juice from this smartphone. Coming to the cameras, the Gionee Marathon M5 Lite smartphone comes with an 8MP camera at the back with autofocus and LED flash and 5MP front camera. The rear camera supports 1080p video recording, too.

The rear camera is certainly not among the high points of the Gionee Marathon M5 Lite. Images captured by the rear camera in day light turned out to be grainy and missed details. Low-light shots were also underwhelming. Video capture was functional at best. The front camera is good for taking occasional selfies and video chats.

Verdict
Gionee came up with the Lite version of the Marathon M5 to capture the budget segment. But with all that it is offering, in terms of specs, it is difficult to recommend this phone fully. At Rs 12,855, the smartphone is at par with the competition in terms of price range. But sadly, not so much in terms of performance.