Gionee Marathon M3 vs Lenovo A5000: The battle of battery and memory

In spite of fast paced innovation in the smartphone technology on all fronts, there is one front where innovation has been rather slow, and this is battery. Moreover, with millions of apps and so much more to do in a smartphone, it is really hard to figure out what battery size would be ideal for a smartphone. Two Chinese brands are battling out in Indian market with their devices, Gionee Marathon M3 and Lenovo A5000, that boast of having 5000 mAh and 4000 mAh battery size respectively. In this comparative review, we examine what all these two high-battery devices come with.

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Design

The style and design is not much distinctive with a simple candy bar design. While Gionee M3 comes with dimension 144.50x71.45x10.40mm and weighs 180g, Lenovo A 5000 has slightly slimmer and lighter body with dimensions 140x71.4x9.98 mm weighing 160g. Largely made of plastic, Gionee Marathon carries a massive non removable battery inside and is available in black and white variants. On the other hand, Lenovo A5000 is madeof polycarbonate plastic and non-sticky fingerprints materials and is also available in black and white variants. However, a relatively slimmer design and light body with rounded edges makes this device comfortable to hold.

Display

The display screen size of both Lenovo A5000 and Gionee Marathon M3 is 5 inch, which allows for better visual experience. Both devices have IPS LCD capacitive touch screen with 16M colours and offers a resolution of 720x1280 pixels HD with 294 ppi pixel density which is very sharp, clear and detailed. The viewing angles are pretty decent and the sunlight legibility is also fine. Therefore, on the display front, the performance of both the devices is pretty much the same.

Performance

Both Marathon M3 and Lenovo A5000 run on Android 4.4 Kitkat. However, Gionee has tried to give their device a distinctive look by creating their own skin Amigo UI layered on top of the OS. Both devices have a MediaTek MT6582M 1.3 GHz Quad-core processor, coupled with a 1 GB RAM. However, nowadays with the bombardment of mobile apps 1 GB RAM is considered to be a ediocre feature. In daily use, both device works fine and do respond to tap and swipe instantly. Both the devices are configured with 8GB of internal memory, which is expandable upto 32 GB in Lenovo A5000 and 128 GB in Gionee M3 via MicroSD card, which provides Gionee an edge over Lenovo.

Battery and Camera

Battery life is the USP of these products where Lenovo A5000 comes with 4000 mAh battery and Gionee Marathon M3 with a whooping 5000 mAh battery. Lenovo gives a talk time of 35h (2G) and 17h (3G). On the other hand, Gionee M3 gives an outstanding talk time of 51 h (2G) and 32 h (3G). Both devices have an 8 MP primary camera and a 2 MP secondary camera. The camera quality for both devices is decent capturing HD videosand images. Even the 2 MP front cameras perform well when it comes to taking selfies. Both the devices areequipped with features like geo-tagging, face detection and Panorama Shot.

Connectivity and other Features

Both Gionee Marathon and Lenovo A5000 are dual-sim phones, which support 3G. Addition to that both the smartphones have Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, FM, 3.5mm audio jack, accelerometer and proximity sensor.

Conclusion

We note that both the devices are pretty much comparable on most of the indicators. Nevertheless, Gionee takes a definite lead on two counts i.e. expandable memory and battery. This reflects in price, where Gionee Marathon M3 is available at around Rs.10,500 and Lenovo A5000 at around Rs.10,000. However, Lenovo has been in Indian market for a longer period and has built some brand image. Therefore, it would be a challenge for Gionee to beat Lenovo in this segment.