What are Meizu up to?

tails2

I have been wondering for quite some time now, what exactly are they trying to pull?

What I mean is, most other decent media player manufacturers release at least 1 or 2 new designs and products a year and these are usually different from previous ones. Sometimes they might recycle players but with better specs, battery and an upgrade in storage space. But for some reason Meizu seems to be stuck on trying to constantly re-do the M6.

Now there is nothing 'too' bad about the M6. There are some firmware issues that have never been fixed, but for the most part they can be lived with. But my annoyance with them is they don't seem to be developing or trying to widen their product line like they should.

Before anyone tries to flame me, of course I know about the M7 & M8. But they have been in development for over a year now and since then Meizu has released a total of ZERO new products. When I say ZERO I am purposely leaving out the new M6 as it is simply an old player recycled and not a proper 'new' player. I love Meizu, but i seriously hope they get their act together and release a new line of players with or very soon after the M7 & M8 otherwise I fear they will head down the same path Motorola are on, recycling the same stuff over and over again and losing fans and customers.

DusL

Well if the release period truely turns out to be Q3, then it will be 1,5 years of no new products actually. We don't even know whether the M8 will turn out to be a good buy to begin with, the delays aren't making them popular either.

So I don't know, they aren't up to anything right now. The Chinese are always making me wait, for f*cks sake. Anyone ever tried to buy a flashcard from x? Chinese webshop with popular items and great prices, but i'm waiting for 1,5 month right now to recieve a goddamn items that seems to be permanently out of stock

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Owns a 16gig iTouch and 16 gig iPhone3G, everybody must hate me right now :D

jarmarc

Personally I think the biggest problem is that they take so long in development, that by the time they actually release specs and pricing, someone has already released something similar at a lower cost. This forces them to "redesign" in order to take cost out to make it commercially viable, lengthening the development time.

I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that this is what caused the delay in the M8. When Apple lowered their price of the iPhone immediately after release, it made everyone trying to make a competing product, inluding Meizu, re-evaluate their own price position.

Unless they decide to develop a truly unique product that is all their own from the ground up, catch up development will continually haunt them.

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hotboxx

Meizu is a young Chinese company founded in 2003. In 2007 they produced for only 50 million USD of mp3 players. I am very shure that Apple has a multiple amount for R&D. Meizu is doing their best to make high quality mp3 players. The development of the iPhone took more than 1 1/2 year and nobody complained about that because nobody knew about the iPhone. I am also looking forward to see the official release of the Meizu M8. It is better to wait longer than to get it fast and get a half developed product. The other Chinese mp3 player builders are launching their new products just like a automatic gun. But those new product disappear as fast as they come. Does anybody remember the Hacha PA20 or the touchscreen Teclast? Let's have another point of view, Meizu is like Rolls Royce or Porsche, they don't have to launch a new model every year either, they just improve a good product.

DusL

Rofl you're really giving them too much credit here :D

The m6 was only good when it was first released, it had better-than-ipodnano specs for the same price. It's an old product now though and they underpriced it atm to keep it interesting. The m3 is even worse right now in terms of specs, and should only be bought for a very simple mp3-player.

So to call them the Rolls Royce or Porsche is going a bit too far :P
I wouldn't buy any product from Meizu's current lineup (2 products) right now.

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Owns a 16gig iTouch and 16 gig iPhone3G, everybody must hate me right now :D

hotboxx

Ferrari then? ;-)

tails2

Meizu are more like Ford, ha ha.

To be honest everyone knows about the M8/M7 and I was generally hinting more towards the product line as a whole and asking why they haven't been developing anything new for it. The thing is, is that they are supposed to be a media player company only. Granted they are about to release a phone but are realistically only a media player company and at that should be advancing and updating their product line accordingly.

You cant really compare them to apple either in saying, 'well apple only have the ipods and only ever update them and don't really release new products'. The reason for me saying you can't compare them is because apple is not only a media player based company like meizu is and their front line product in this area is and more than likely always will be the ipod. And realistically they have updated their product too. They started with the ipod and since then have brought out the shuffle, the nano and the touch.

I am not an ipod fan, I owned an ipod and got rid of it the first chance i got. I then got an iriver H320, have had several iriver products since and still have them, have had creative products, have cowon products and also have an M6. I have to say that out of all of the companies, Meizu seems to be progressing the slowest and don't seem to be advancing. Until I actually have an M7/8 in my hand ( and I live in china so i'll see it before most of you guys) then I won't talk about it being in their product line when comparing them to other companies.

sere83

I have thought the same for a long time. How can a company that makes media players survive without making new products for so long? Particualrly in the chinese maket where new players are released almost daily. I suppose it must be remembered though that the quality of Meizu's players is far superior to many chinese players. Nevertheless it does seem very strange how they have released nothing new for a long time. I think what happened is they miscalculated how long the R&D process would take and also encountered certain unpredicted technical difficulties with the m8 along the way. I also suspect they might end up using the upgraded ARM11 processor which has yet to go into mass production. The good news is that because it has been so long I suspect Meizu are under personal and commercial pressure to release the M8, meaning that it may actually come out when they say it will. I think aswell that if the rumours are true and Meizu is really hoping to push the M8 in the western market then there must have been a lot of negotiation with telecoms providers over seas as well which may have taken a long time too.
I think J.Wongs comments in the chinese forum about needing support and requesting that people be patient, shows that he is well aware the M8 has taken far far too long and is asking people to hang in there and not lose faith in the company. It is approximately 2 weeks until the M8 is said to be making it's first public appearence, I'm hoping Meizu will silence the critics and come through with the first real competitor to the iphone. Also, I'm hoping that once they have released the M8 the M7 may follow relatively soon after (like within 6/7 monthes). If the M7 is built on a Win Ce framework, it will undoubtably be easier to produce after all the work on the M8.

tails2

I hear where you are coming from sere83 and I also have a lot of patience and understanding and that's why I haven't bad mouthed Meizu for their repeated failure to show a working prototype and their repeated process of giving a date and then watching as that date passes by with nothing.

But what I am getting at is that they shouldn't be putting all their eggs in one basket. In fact any eggs in any basket is what I am looking for. They should be releasing other products too and not simply working for over a year on this. I can see this either being the milestone that made Meizu a leading brand in the world, or the breaking point that literally broke Meizu. If this is a failure I find it hard for Meizu to comeback from this and this is why i don't understand why they have been putting their whole company on the line for this. If they were releasing other new players while we waited for this, I don't think it would hit as hard if this failed as they would have other players out there that would already be popular. The M6, to me, is kinda like the Motorola razr series, its been done and done and done. You can't do much more with it.



EDIT: Another thing I am wondering about is, what's next. What comes after the M7/8? I just hope they have other plans on the board that they are planning on going ahead with. I can't see me waiting around for another 18 months for their next product to come out after this hits.

Oh and also Aigo are a top Chinese brand electronics maker who, in my opinion, have a very good range of products that Meizu should be jealous of.

kadajawi

I think that the M8 is a huge effort for Meizu. The iPhone was one for Apple, granted they released other things too during the 1 1/2, 2 years they took for the iPhone, but then they have far more money, engineers, designers etc., and excellent they are. And of course there is Steve Jobs, who has a vision and knows how to push his employees. Anyway, I guess if Meizu dedicated parts of their engineers to other products, we would wait a few years more until the M8 is done. And they really need to bring it out quickly, which is why it appears that work on the M7 has stopped. I think they should be able to do a M7 rather fast, after the M8 is done, with the things they have learned with the M8.

I do think though that maybe they should have done something in the mean time. A good successor of the M6, based on things they have learned when making the M8. Maybe even release the M7. That way, more cash would have come into the company and they might have hired more engineers, to speed up the development.