Battery technology keeps chugging along, but doesn’t seem to be advancing as fast as other aspects of mobile hardware. Motorola got kudos for packing a 3,900 mAh battery into the newly announced Droid Turbo, but a Chinese firm you’ve probably never heard of just bested the Turbo with a 5,000mAh battery.
All that power and the Gionee Marathon M3 is still just a five-inch phone that’s 10.4mm thick.The Android-powered Marathon M3 is designed for the Indian market and costs a mere 12,999 rupees (about $210), but it doesn’t include any Google services. With that price, you can probably guess that the specs aren’t terribly impressive compared to the rest of the mobile device ecosystem. The specs might be modest, but that could be a good thing when it comes to battery life.
The M3’s five-inch screen is a 720p LCD, which works out to a respectable 293 pixels per inch. There’s 1GB of RAM, 8GB of built-in storage with a microSD card slot, and dual SIM slots. At the heart of the Marathon M3 is a quad-core MediaTek processor running low-power Cortex-A7 cores clocked to 1.3GHz. There’s also no LTE radio and only two 3G bands. Basically, the hardware is very budget-oriented.
This isn’t a case of an unknown Chinese firm cracking the code on how to fit giant batteries in a smaller phone. The Marathon M3 simply has a lot of space for a battery to occupy because there isn’t very much in there. With the very modest hardware, the 5,000mAh battery can keep this phone running days longer than high-end flagship devices.
Of course, you might need all that extra time when you have to wait on the phone to struggle through tasks.So yes, on the surface the Gionee Marathon M3 has some impressive stats, but you really have to interested in battery life and very little else to get excited about this device. Still, there are some people who would be willing to make sacrifices for a zillion hours of screen-on time.