Gionee Marathon M3 Hands-on & Photo Gallery – Phone with 5000 mAh Battery & Reverse Charging

The Marathon M3 isn’t just a hyped name or something. Marathon means something about the battery, and it actually does a good job in that aspect. We do see some smartphones with good capacity batteries, i.e. 3000+ mAh. But Gionee’s Marathon M3 has a massive 5000 mAh battery.

What’s so special about it? the battery would obviously stay for a little longer than the other smartphone batteries, given the capacity, isn’t it? there is actually something very cool about the device. The first thing is – it actually lasts for about two days on normal usage, and the claims by the company aren’t wrong at all.

Second one – The Marathon M3 is not just a phone with a huge battery but also is your battery pack when your other smartphone is in need of some power. This means, you can use the “Reverse Charging” option through the USB OTG Cable provided to charge any other MicroUSB powered device. Do make a note that in order to use this feature you need to ensure that the M3 is charged at 100% and you use the OTG Micro-USB Cable provided by Gionee.

The Marathon M3 doesn’t feel huge in any angle, and frankly, we did expect a beast of a device to have such a powerful battery under the hood. And the other good part, is that Gionee hasn’t given this the Amigo UI, thus making it look like any standard UI with the full fledged app drawer, dedicated home screens for widgets and shortcuts, and the phone runs Android 4.4.2 KitKat.

It’s the polycarbonate back that can be removed, but you cannot pull out the battery by yourself. What’s the need? especially when you have the battery of this smartphone helping charge some other device. The M3 doesn’t have any other specs to boast about, and the company isn’t calling it a powerful high-end device. There is this 720p 5-inch display on the front, and a 1.3GHz Mediatek quad-core chipset with 1GB RAM, so you don’t expect this to give you the swiftest performance.

On the initial use, the only thing I kept looking at – the battery percentage. It doesn’t fret, and the drain is snail slow on pace when using it normally. This is a clear winner over the lot when we did a few battery tests, and if you were expecting some bigger players to beat it on daily usage, no surprises as the phone actually stands atop the list for easily taking it over a day without you having to rush to the charger.

Earlier: News – Gionee Marathon M3 with a Massive 5000 mAh Battery Announced for Rs. 12999

How much ever smart a smartphone can try to be, it is actually good only when the battery lasts for a good time and the user doesn’t have to run for a charger all the time. Gionee’s Marathon series has been known to have smartphones with heavy capacity batteries, and the latest in the series, the Gionee Marathon M3, is known to have a 5000 mAh battery. Face the truth, not many tablet devices have better batteries than this smartphones has.

Gionee has now officially announced the smartphone, for the price of Rs. 12999. The predecessor M2 had a 4200 mAh battery, and the M3 now has the massive 5000 mAh battery.

According to Gionee, the Marathon M3 is able to get 32.46 hours of talk time on 3G, and up to 51 hours of talk time on 2G networks, or 32.8 days of standby time on a single full charge. The M3 has a 5-inch HD display (1280×720 pixels resolution), and that comes with the IPS One-Glass solution technology. It is powered by a 1.3 GHz quad-core processor (Cortex A7 chipset), ARM Mali 450MP GPU and 1GB RAM.

The USB OTG support is there, and this is extended to even support pen drives, unlike the M2 which had USB OTG only to charge other devices. There is an 8GB internal storage, and the storage can be expanded to 128GB using a MicroSD card. The camera combination includes 8-megapixel rear shooter and a 2-megapixel front facing camera. The M3 will run Android 4.4 KitKat out of the box, with a customized UI (not the Amigo UI that the Elife E series comes with).

The connectivity options in the Marathon M3 include 3G, Wi-Fi, WLAN Direct, Micro-USB, GPRS/ EDGE, GPS/ A-GPS, FM radio and Bluetooth 4.0 with A2DP. Although a large battery, the phone isn’t really huge, because the thickness is limited to 10.4mm. There are two variants, the Black and white one to be launched officially, but on eBay, the black one is already available.

The phone is priced at Rs. 12999, and for this price point, the smartphone looks great, especially for the good battery.