Yesterday was the big day for Meizu since they unveiled their new flagship and successor of the MX4, the Meizu MX5. The Meizu M2 unlike rumors suggested hasn't been unveiled. Now the Meizu MX5 isn't a huge surprise since most of the specs have been known in advance, but what it definitely is is one of the best phones from China this year. Well, actually it looks like that, the final verdict has to wait until the review. Anyway, what's inside?
The Meizu MX5 actually is a 5.5-inch phablet with 1080p resolution which means that Meizu went away from their special aspect ratio to a standard screen. What's surprising though is that this time their flagship comes with a Super AMOLED screen instead of an LCD panel. And not only that, it even supports 100% of the NTSC color gamut and boasts a contrast ratio of 10,000:1. The panel is protected by Gorilla Glass 3. Below the screen Meizu embedded a physical home button that is touch sensitive and also capable of recognizing fingerprints. Like the rumors and leaks we spotted ahead of the launch suggested, the Meizu MX5 indeed comes with a full metal unibody design this time, which means there is no removable back anymore and the SIM cards will be placed in a special tray this time. Despite the large display, all the metal and a big battery, the phone does only weight 149g, which is pretty much nothing for a phablet. Also, it is extremely thin at only 7.6mm.
Turning to the insides, the Meizu MX5 comes with a very powerful Mediatek Helio X10 SoC clocked at 2.2GHz, so it actually is the MT6795T. In our test of the LeTV X600 the 2GHz version of this chip proved to be more powerful than the Snapdragon 810 in the long run, so you can really expect a very good performance here. The chipset is coupled with 3GB of LPDDR3 RAM and a 3,150mAh battery, which should be more than enough. The battery will even support fast charging which Meizu call mCharge. This technology is capable of charging the device from 0% to 50% within 30 minutes. Another change is that for the very first time Meizu do support Dual SIM in a flagship phone. Unfortunately you will need two nano SIM cards to make use of that. An SD card slot unfortunately is still missing, which according to Meizu is due to the fact that SD cards are slower. Well, Xiaomi has the same point of view, but that obviously doesn't mean that we have to agree with that.
As we are used to from Meizu, camera is another very important part of the MX5. This time, Meizu does again use the Sony IMX220 sensor with 20.7 mega pixels but greatly improved the focus time to 0.2 seconds by using a laser auto focus. The LED flash is a dual LED, dual tone one. Unfortunately there is no support for Mediatek Super Slow Motion (480fps @1080p) which would need a Sony IMX230 sensor. This is a little disappointing since Meizu could've been the first company to make use of that feature.
Rather surprising is the fact that Meizu didn't unveil a new iteration of Flyme OS this time. The Meizu MX5 will still run the current Flyme 4.5 but based on Android 5 Lollipop this time round. Maybe this just means that they haven't been able to finish work on Flyme 5 in time but still there are exciting news: From now on Meizu will make Flyme an open source ROM, releasing the code on GitHub for everyone to create their own flavors of Flyme OS. That definitely should attract a lot of developers to Meizu in the future.
The Meizu MX5 has become available in China through JD and the likes at prices of 1799 Yuan for the 16GB version, 1999 Yuan for the 32GB version and 2399 Yuan for the 64GB version. International availability should take off within a month from now. We already have a review sample on the way to us, so stay tuned for a full review.
Pictures: Meizu
EmoticonEmoticon