Meizu MX - The Review

First of all, I hope you can forgive me it took so long to finally out this review and I also apologize for my limited english skills
I really hope you'll still enjoy my review

Table of contents:

1. History
2. Design and Build Quality
3. Hardware
4. Camera
5. Audio
6. Software and UI
7. Benchmarks
8. Wrap-up

History


Let's go back in time a few years all the way to 2003 when Meizu entered the chinese market with their very first consumer product. It was a cheap and small audio player with 128 or 256 Mb built-in memory and it was called the Meizu MX. Now, nine years later when you see that name on tech sites that's probably not the first thing that comes to your mind (and not the second either...), but the company's latest and greatest Android powered smartphone. If you're unfamiliar with Meizu you should know this phone is their second Android powered handset so they are still fairly new in this territory.
The previous model, namely the M9 which had been released about a year ago was selling like hotcakes in China and people were forming massive queues in front of Meizu stores around the country to get their hands on one and walk home with it. It was a product with great hardware (basically the same as a Samsung Galaxy S, but with a higher-resolution display) paired with a very appealing price point that made it very competitive among the offerings of other big manufacturers like HTC, Samsung or Motorola. It also got the attention of lots of international customers, but unfortunately they ended up with a phone that had lots of software bugs that took a very long time for Meizu to iron out and thus they've lost many supporters along the way. The device was also famous of overheating to the point it was uncomfortable to hold to your ear or in your hand while gaming.
Otherwise the company is known of taking good care of their customers, listening to their feedback and suggestions, but all that took too much time. In one year of development they've learned a lot, and with the MX they seem to have grown out of puberty and produced a high-end smartphone. Let's see how well it performs...

Design and Build Quality

(Click on the photo for more pictures of the device!)

Compared to the MX the M9 feels cheap with it's paper-thin matte plastic back cover. The MX is on a whole different level with it's shiny crystal-like backside which offers a solid grip, altough, sadly still attracting fingerprints. It looks beautiful and gives the "Meizu MX" text a 3D effect in certain lighting conditions as it has a transparent layer sitting on top of the white layer. Meizu has learned from past mistakes and this cover won't creak when you apply pressure on it. It's also a real hassle to peel off. Fortunately though, you won't be doing that a lot, since you can't replace it's battery, nor you'll find a microSD card slot hidden under it - one of the biggest drawback of this phone. You're probably asking now why it's removable then when they could have made it so that the SIM slot is accessible from the side of the phone... I'm not sure what's the reason but it would be interesting to hear.
One more thing about this cover is that it contains the flashlight of the camera - a very strange decision again that eliminates the chance of third party manufacturers releasing covers in the future and Meizu has already confirmed they have no plans of releasing other covers either.
The phone has a metal framing and thus it weighs in at 139 gramms and has the dimensions of 121.3×63.3×10.3 mm. Both size and weight can be filed under average so nothing extraordinary here. Before you turn on the screen you won't notice anything unusual except for the very small circular home button (~5 mm in diameter) that stands out of the device rather than sitting in line with it (it's referred to as a "nipple" on the company's forums). It's surprisingly comfortable and easy to press and from my experience it won't be clicked accidentally when it's in your pockets. After turning the screen on you'll notice the two "bottom light keys" - as Meizu calls them - lighting up - one of them is the Back, the other one is the Menu button. They seem like ordinary touch keys but there's a twist (literally). These will actually change orientation along with the screen so the Back button will always look like a < and the Menu button will be a horizontal line despite of how you hold your device. If there are no function of the keys in applications only the middle dot will light up (both keys are drawn from a + shape and contain 5 little lights). They also act as notification lights when you have unread SMS, missed calls, new emails or other notifications and when you touch them they will shine even brighter for a split second in response and are of course haptic-feedback supported.

Another downside with the MX is you only get a mono speaker which is located on the right hand side of the device and you’re probably end up covering it with your palm so the volume will go down noticably (it’s ok if you’re left handed like me though). It’s loud enough, good for loudspeaker enabled calls, but don’t expect quality audio playback from it.

As for hardware buttons you’ll only get a power button on the top of the device, a volume rocker on the left hand side and the small circular home button I mentioned earlier.

Hardware


The Meizu MX is equipped with a dual-core Samsung Exynos CPU which operates at 1,4 Ghz (the same can be found in the Samsung Galaxy Note) paired with a powerful Mali400 MP4 GPU, 1 GB LPDDR 2 RAM and 16 or 32 Gb built-in memory. At the time of this review only the 16 Gb version had been released and it’s priced at 2999 CNY which translates roughly to 470 USD. The display is a 4” ASV model from Sharp with 640x960 resolution and 16 million colors which provides excellent viewing angles, well-saturated colors and good contrast ratio. Also it has oleophobic coating on it so fingerprints can be wiped off easily. It’s the same screen that was used in the M9, only bigger, and I found outdoor performance to be slightly better. My only gripe with it is that there are very obvious backlight leaking at the top of the screen, but thankfully it’s only noticable when you’re looking at it from a specific angle (might be only my device though...)
As far as connectivity goes you’ll get a quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) radio, a pentaband UMTS (850/900/1700/1900/2100 MHz) chip, Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR support, a WIFI/WAPI module (802.11 b/g/n) as well as a GPS and digital compass. The MX is also equipped with a microUSB port that is capable of HDMI and SPDIF out via a special adapter which is sadly not part of the accessories. It can also be used for USB Host, but as many reviewers pointed out the MX can’t power any device on it’s own, not even a mouse or a keyboard… That’s very sad and it means you won’t be able to use even an USB stick on-the-go as intended.
All this hardware is backed up by a 1600 mAh lithium-polymer battery which is non-removable as stated earlier and sadly you’ll find yourself hooking it up to the charger at the end of the day with average usage that includes web browsing via Wifi or mobile data, gaming, listening to music, a few phone calls and texting. I would still put that performance in the ‘average’ group.

Camera


The MX is equipped with an 8 megapixels backside-illuminated camera sensor by Sony (Exmor R to be precise) which has a maximum aperture of f/2.2 and a focal length that is equivalent of 28 mm which is quite wide angle for a phone camera. Sitting above the lens there's a powerful LED flash. The lens is located at a place that is usually covered by your palm when holding the device, so sadly you'll easily contaminate it with fingerprints. However as many tech sites who got the engineering samples back in December complained about this Meizu promised the final product would get an oleophobic coating on the lens, so this problem should be eliminated.

When capturing photos you can tweak the following settings:

- Capture mode: You can choose between Normal, Panorama, and smile detection.
- ISO: Goes from 50 to 3200, can be set to automatic
- Scene: Pre-defined options include Auto, Text, Portrait, Landscape, Sports, Night, Sunset and Macro
- Wide Dinamic Mode (WDR): Off, Auto, Low, Middle, High
- Photo Size: 3264x2448, 2560x1920, 2048x1536, 1600x1200, 1280x960
- White Balance: Auto, Incandescent, Fluorescent, Warm Fluorescent, Daylight, Cloudy, Shade, Horizon
- Location: toggle for geotagging
- Flash: Auto, Off, On

Sadly you won’t find a dedicated camera button so you’ll either have to use the on-screen button or the volume up button to take your shot. The volume down button by the way can switch between photo and camcorder mode.

The MX has an excellent macro mode where you can get extremely close (~ 5 cm) to an object and it can still focus. Thanks to the 2.2 aperture you will also be able to blur the background significantly to make your theme really pop. Find some examples below (click on the photo to open the gallery with more images):



Picture quality is sadly lacking as the noise reduction algorythm tends to kill fine details and lots of my photos turned out over-exposed. Also I’ve seen traces of chromatic aberration, but it’s hardly noticable. I feel the hardware would be capable of much more so here’s hoping Meizu can tweak the software further for best results. Exposure correction would also be great. Currently you get the best photos if you enable wide dynamic mode and set it to Low or Middle, however you'll have to deal with increased noise in darker areas of the photos. Still it takes fairly decent pictures especially under low lightning conditions thanks to the BSI technology and the exposure speed is also lighting fast.

Here are some night/low light shots (click on the photo to open the gallery with more images):



Panorama mode is a nice feature where you only need to pan with your phone in your hand from left to right and it will automatically merge multiple photos to one wide viewing angle photo. Sadly though you can only pan from left to right at the moment and you won't be able to tweak any of the photo settings in this mode. Check out some samples below (click on the photo to open the gallery with more images):



The camera can also record videos in full HD (1920x1080 @ 30 fps) resolution altough it's not completely stable at the moment as audio tends to get out-of-sync in longer videos and there are noticable lags at times. Performance otherwise would be good as you get constant auto-focus and the camera handles fast moves pretty well too. Meizu is currently working on fixing this.

You'll also get a front-facing camera (which measures only 16 mm3 and it's currently the smallest camera in the industry) sitting next to the earpiece which is good for video chats but don't expect much from it as it's only capable of taking VGA resolution photos and videos.

More sample shots (click on the photo to open the gallery with more images):

Audio


The company was famous for creating high quality audio players (M6, M3) with Wolfson DACs before they took a dive into the smartphone market so naturally you should have high expectations in terms of audio quality. Shortly after the M9 was released fans started to complain of its sound quality and later it turned out it has Texas Instruments chip inside that was a far cry from the familiar Meizu-sound. With the MX however they are back to their roots and again chose Wolfson to satisfy those white-ear owners. It was the right choice to make because the MX runs circles around the M9 in this department. Bass and treble plays back in a wider range through the standard 3,5 mm headphone jack and overall the sound is very clear and lively. You would of course need a pair of nice earphones to fully enjoy it’s sound as you won’t find one among the accessories. In addition the audio player has support for a wide variety of audio files including FLAC, APE, ACC, MKA, OGG, MP3, MIDI, M4A, AMR and WAV files by default.
It should also be noted that when calling the audio coming from the MX’s earpiece is a bit tinny, although loud enough so still gets the job done.

Software and UI


The Android system on Meizu phones is quite different on what you’re used to on other devices. Meizu has customised the OS in a way that it doesn’t resemble much to the vanilla Android anymore and they even named it Flyme OS. It’s a classy and user friendly interface which has many little improvements (some borrowed from other manufacturers…) that makes for a good user experience. It’s kind of like if iOS and Android had a baby. There’s no app drawer to be found anywhere so all your app icons are placed on your homescreens instead (of which you can have up to ten) in a 4x4 grid, but you can create folders to group applications and store twelve icons in each of them. If you want to uninstall an application just press and hold it’s icon and drag it to the bottom of the screen. There are three icons at the bottom of the screen that will either launch the phone app (which has your call history, contacts and dialer grouped together), the browser or the messaging app. If you press and hold the power button a menu will pop up where you can either shutdown or restart the phone but as an extra you’ll also find five buttons below them for toggling Mute, Vibration, Airplane Mode, Phone Off and Automatic Screen Rotation. Pressing and holding the Menu button will open a screen where you will again get five buttons on top to toggle Wifi, Mobile Data, Bluetooth, GPS and Auto Sync and underneath of them a scrollable list of available Wifi networks, as well as a switch for Network Mode. This screen also acts as a task manager where you can see the currently running applications and to force them close you only need to drag their icons to the bottom of the screen or if you scroll this list to the left you will find a button to close all running apps. At the very bottom of this screen you’ll find music control buttons and the song title of the current track. Another idea borrowed from the iOS is that if you touch the notification bar where the clock is located (top right corner) it automatically scrolls to the top of long menus and the same method works in the web browser too.
The lockscreen also doesn’t resemble of the standard Android UI. You get three icons at the bottom of the screen and dragging them towards the top of the screen will take you directly to either the phone, desktop or the messaging application. When you’re looking at the lockscreen you can press the Menu button to show/hide the controls for the music player.

Here’s the list of apps that are preinstalled on the device and a brief description of what they can do:

• Notes - A very simple notes application with vertical scrolling list of your notes and four different color variations. There’s also a widget for this app.
• Calculator - Nothing extraordinary here.
• Alarm Clock - Customize the ringtone and snooze time for multiple alarms, set the repeat interval and add labels. Works even when you turn off your phone completely for the night. It will boot up at the time of the alarm.
• Music - Create and manage playlists, sort by Albums and Artists, edit ID3 tags, download lyrics and cover art for your songs, set sleep timer and fine tune EQ settings manually.
• Video - Can playback 1080p videos without lags, can switch between audio tracks in movies and it can also display subtitles.
• Documents - An excellent file manager with basic file operations and a few extras. It can also unpack zip or rar files, open word, excel, ppt (for read only) and pdf files directly without 3rd party software.
• Gallery - Will only show photos from your Photos and Camera folder, not like the vanilla Gallery app. Can rotate and crop pictures, open gif files (animated), bulk delete, play slideshow and fast thumbnail search (yup, iOS).
• Recorder - A sound recorder app that can also record phone calls if you want.
• Calendar - Reskinned Calendar app that also has a nice widget.
• Camera - Read the Camera part of the review.
• Browser - Reskinned default browser.
• Market, Maps, Google Talk, Gmail, Translate - Original apps you would get on any other phone.
• News and Weather - Does what it says, also has a nice widget (News and Weather, Weather only, News only)
• MStore - Meizu’s own software store, nothing much to see here if you can’t speak the language.

Here are some screenshots of the Flyme OS (click on the picture below to see more):



Also worth noting is the cloud-sync service called Flyme which can automatically backup your contacts, notes, calendar, messages, call log and settings if you have a data connection enabled so these things can easily be restored after upgrading the firmware.
While the current system is based on Gingerbread the company promised an upgrade to the latest Ice Cream Sandwich release sometime in the future, but there’s no specific date announced yet. They’ve also promised to release a vanilla Android firmware without all their customizations, so if you don’t like their UI you’ll be able to choose the standard version.

Benchmarks


Here, the results are compared to a Samsung Galaxy S II. The firmware I ran these tests with was an unreleased version. CPU was always set to High (1,4 Ghz).

	Meizu MX	Samsung Galaxy S II
Vellamo	853	933
AnTuTu	6738	5826
Linpack (Single/Multi-Thread)	64,388 MFLOPS / 1,36 s 73,847 / 2,47 s	56,124 MFLOPS / 1,49 s 88,392 / 1,94 s
Smartbench 2012 (Productivity/Gaming)	2950/1598	2680/2146
CF-Bench (Native, Java, Overall)	12664, 3981, 7454	11442, 3125, 6449
Quadrant Standard	3668	3322
Browser tests
html5test.com	182+1/475	184+1/475
Sunspider	3024,2 ms	3821,2 ms

I should also mention the famous heating problem that should be a familiar issue for Meizu M9 owners. The MX will also get hot (but not as much as the M9) when playing games or running CPU heavy applications but only around the headphone jack area and it’s cooling down faster thanks to their engineering improvements.

Wrap-up


The MX turned out to be a great device both hardware and software-wise. I have only met a few software problems since I’ve been using it but many of them were already fixed with software updates. I only wish the battery would last longer so I don’t have to carry the charger with me everywhere.
Really looking forward to the quad-core version of the device and I’m very curious of what surprises they have in store for us for the future. Expect an update for this review when the Ice Cream Sandwich update finally sees the light!

The good	The bad
- Powerful SOC paired with a very powerful GPU - Great display - Patented “bottom light keys” that also act as notification lights - Wide range of supported audio and video formats	- No microSD slot - No dedicated camera button - Non-removable battery

- reserved for videos -

nice weather, nice pictures, nice review~

very perfect review thanks

Great review, more professional looking than what some of the big tech blogs serve up these days...

really a good review, thanks.

The first review without iPhone-clone comments in every line. Good job!

Very nice; no need to apologize for your English nor taking the time to cover everything so clearly and thoroughly.

Since this review is written for a general audience, you might consider adding a line about the two versions of the MX and which version you're using.


Also, I wonder if you'd care to elaborate on this...

The firmware I ran these tests with was an unreleased version.

I've only written that to indicate the test scores might be lower/higher than those in the other reviews

finally...

great Review bro! Nicely done.
Here are two comments from me:

1. the back cover does not give the MX a solid grip IMHO. It is pretty slippy like all piano lacquer covered devices.
2. there are not two volume rockers, there is only one. A rocker is a button which you can tilt in two directions.

Thanks iceman! Corrected the article

First Review with "BALLS"