Gionee, a company that is famous for making the thinnest phones on the market (until outdone by Oppo and Blu), has today announced the arrival of two new smartphones, the Gionee Elife E8 and the Gionee Marathon M5. Both these smartphones were announced at the company’s press event in Beijing today and both are aiming to change the way we look at smartphones’ battery lives and performance.
The Gionee Marathon M5 packs a mighty punch in the battery department with a unit that measures 6020 mAh and should last up to 4 days on regular use. The company seems to have been inspired by all the chatter going on about batteries following the Galaxy S6 and HTC One M9 launch and decided to make a phone that would overcome the problems users were facing.
The company implemented their own battery saving mode into the Gionee Marathon M5, which will let users enjoy the last 5 % of their battery life for up to 60 hours in standby, which sounds pretty amazing. The smartphone is also equipped with fast charging and the company says it can also function as a power bank for additional devices that might need charging, so it’s not just a smartphone, it’s a hybrid device.
Besides being a powerhouse when it comes to battery life, the Gionee Marathon M5 also comes with a massive 5.5 inch display that has a 1280*720 resolution on an AMOLED panel to facilitate less power consumption and a high definition viewing experience. It comes with a (thus far) unnamed quad core processor, 2 GB RAM and 16 GB internal storage, with a microSD card slot available for extra expansion.
The camera setup of the Gionee Marathon M5 consists of an 8 MP camera on the rear with an LED flash and a 5 MP selfie-camera on the front. The company has not gone into details about what version of Android the smartphone will run on, but it has put a lot of emphasis on battery power, which is what we’re most curious about when it comes to the mid-ranger.
The Gionee Marathon M5 was not alone at the event today in Beijing, as Gionee also introduced the Elife E8, the flagship smartphone from the Chinese company this year. The Elife E8 is not as detailed as the M5, as the company only emphasized its camera, which is astonishing from what we hear. The Gionee Elife E8 comes with a massive 23.7 MP camera with optical image stabilization lossless zoom and which can take photos up to 100 mpxl in resolution, which sounds absolutely amazing. It also comes with a huge 6 inch QHD display, an octa core MediaTek Helio X10 CPU, 3 GB RAM and 64 GB internal storage.
Since we haven’t put these phones to the test just yet, we’re curious to see how long the battery life on the Gionee Marathon M5 will last and how good the camera on the Elife E8 actually is. The Marathon M5 price is set at around $370, while the Elife E8 price will be around $650, according to the company. Both these phones will be released on July 15. We also found out that the company is launching its own mobile payment platform called Gionee Wallet. Whether it’s a good move to go up against Apple Pay and Google Wallet right now or not, Gionee is trying it out.
