Gionee Marathon M4

While the Marathon M4 looks quite boring at first glance, Gionee has attempted to infuse some premiumness into its design by adding a full metal frame. However, the use of metal, coupled with the heavy-duty 5,000mAh battery stowed inside, contribute significantly to the M4's weight. At 176g, the Marathon M4 is as heavy as they come, and the 10.2mm frame adds to the bulk. The only saving grace is the 5-inch display, which makes the smartphone quite compact and easy to wield with a single hand. 

The Marathon M4’s 5-inch screen features HD resolution, equating to a pixel density of 294ppi. Since Gionee has used a Super AMOLED panel, the colours look vivid, and text appears sharp and smooth. Viewing angles are great, and the screen fares decently under bright sunlight too. We also found the display to be extremely responsive and fluid, and great for typing, gaming and watching videos alike.

The Marathon M4 is equipped with an 8MP rear shooter and a 5MP front camera. Apart from the usual modes like full auto, night, HDR and panorama, you'll find a range of modes in the camera app. Take Anytime takes multiple shots for each photo, letting you choose your best shot, track movement trails, choose the best facial expression, display motion blur while keeping the subject in focus, and remove unwanted moving objects from photos. The Face Beauty mode lets you improve portraits and selfies by enlarging eyes, slimming the face, and whitening and smoothening skin. PicNote is a mode specifically for taking photos of documents, optimising the text after you shoot. Additionally, the camera app provides a range of filters which can be applied in real time. While the camera app itself is intuitive and feature packed, image quality is one area where the smartphone really struggles. Most photos appear washed out and lack detail. The camera struggles with focus, particularly with macro shots. We also found a lot of grain, even when there was sufficient lighting. Low light shots are predictably dark and blurry, and using the flash tends to wash out the subject rather than illuminate it.

The Marathon M4 runs Android 5.0 Lollipop, but the stock Android interface is barely visible under Gionee’s Amigo 3.0 UI. We’ve covered Amigo 3.0 in detail in our Gionee Elife S7 review, but we’ll take you through the basics. Similar to other Chinese UI's, Amigo doesn’t feature an app drawer, and you’ll find all the icons scattered across various homescreens. Swiping down from the top brings up the notification pane, and a little shortcut on the right lets you filter app notifications by importance. The iOS-style Control Center is basically a quick settings menu, and is available by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. You’ll find several pre-loaded apps and games on the device, but most of these can be uninstalled.

Powering the Marathon M4 is a quad-core MediaTek MT6735 processor clocked at 1.3GHz, paired with 2GB of RAM. We used the device as our primary smartphone for a few days, and it managed most day-to-day operations like multi-tasking, watching full HD videos and gaming without slowing down. To test the gaming capabilites of the device, we played a bunch of games like Fallout Shelter, Asphalt Nitro and Dead Trigger, and gameplay was a smooth, jitter-free experience. The smartphone tends to get warm after 15-20 minutes of gaming, but never got uncomfortably hot.