Meizu has an interesting history, exiting the smartphone market after a tumultuous few years. Now owned by automaker Geely, the company is poised to return with the launch of his Meizu 20 series on March 30th. An interesting call while we waited.
The company was founded in 2003 and originally manufactured MP3 players. His first phone was announced in January 2007. This was called his Meizu M8 and was running Windows CE 6.0 based “Mymobile” software. However, getting the phone to market proved to be a big problem. It’s been over a year since Meizu first unveiled his M8, which he brought to CeBIT in March 2008, but it’s still in the prototype stage and the software is barely functional. I did. But that was only the beginning of his M8’s troubles.
According to Apple’s lawyers, it wasn’t just similar to the iPhone. After an emergency redesign, the phone was also renamed “miniOne”. A legal battle ensued, and production of the M8 was finally halted in 2010, banning all sales.
Meizu M8: Original Design • Redesign (Image Source)
The Meizu M9 was the company’s first Android phone, launched in early 2011. This model featured the Samsung Hummingbird chipset a year after the first Galaxy S used it. This was just the beginning of Meizu’s relationship with Samsung.
The Meizu MX that followed was also the first official release of the highly customized Android skin known as “Flyme OS”. The MX also used his Exynos chip and had a crisp 4.0-inch qHD display. As our review pointed out, Meizu still borrowed openly from Apple’s designs.
Meizu MX
Moving on to the Meizu MX3, its claim to fame was that it was the first smartphone with 128 GB of internal storage. In 2013 there was a lot of that. If we take a little detour, he should have over 128GB of base storage in his flagship in 10 years. By the way, this phone used his Exynos 5410 Octa (aka Galaxy S4 chipset). Meizu was arguably his biggest Exynos client outside of Samsung.
Mitsu MX3
The company has opened its doors to new suppliers, and the Meizu MX4 in late 2014 was the first to use the MediaTek chipset. It had an eye-catching 5.36-inch bezel-less display (at least on the sides), offered good battery life and audio quality, and the 20.7MP camera was also solid.
Meizu’s main problem at this point was that at a time when services like Xiaomi and OnePlus were expanding rapidly, the company’s phones were relatively unknown outside of China.
Natsu MX4
The 2014 Meizu M1 Note is also worth noting. This is the first model in his Note series that is affordable. Despite the relatively weak MediaTek MT6762 chipset with only a Cortex-A53 core, the 5.5-inch 1080p display used a flashy IGZO panel (although its quality isn’t as good as Sharp’s phones). was).
Meizu M1 Note
Now, let’s skip to the really good stuff, the Meizu Pro 5 was an enviable flagship. Its metal unibody was sleek, as was his 2.5D Gorilla Glass on the front above the 5.7-inch AMOLED display (1080p).
This phone is powered by Exynos 7420 Octa. A few months ago Samsung launched the Galaxy S6 with that exact chip and only that chip (Qualcomm was having his moment in 2015). His 16MP camera sensor from Sony on the back boasted OIS and produced impressive images. The Meizu Pro 5 concluded the review by saying that the Meizu Pro 5 is an easy phone to recommend if you can actually afford it.
Meizu Pro 5
Then came the Meizu Pro 6 in 2016. It was smaller than its predecessor with a 5.2-inch Super AMOLED display, but no less premium (metal body, Gorilla Glass 4, 3D Touch, etc.). However, the reason we remember this model is different. Because it was one of his few phones to use his Helio X25 from MediaTek, a rare chipset with a 10-core CPU.
Meizu Pro 6
The 3-cluster design included two Cortex-A72s (2.5GHz), four A53s (2.0GHz), and four A53s (1.4GHz). It outperformed most Android phones on multi-core benchmarks, but not all (notably, the Galaxy S7 edge and Huawei P9 outperformed them in our tests, if only marginally). ). However, the Mali-T880 MP4 GPU performed poorly in comparison.
The Helio X20 was an early 10-core design (same hardware, but the A72 pair runs at 2.3 GHz), and a few months later Meizu used it in the more affordable MX6. Then there is also the Meizu Pro 6 Plus, which was switched to his Exynos 8890 Octa, the same chipset as the Galaxy S7 used in early 2016. The Plus had a 5.7-inch QHD display with 3D touch.
Meizu MX6 and Meizu Pro 6 Plus
Meizu has always tended to think outside the box, at least when it wasn’t trying to copy the iPhone. The Meizu Pro 7 and Pro 7 Plus launched in mid-2017 and feature 5.2-inch FHD and 5.7-inch QHD Super AMOLED displays on the front, respectively, as well as a 2-inch AMOLED display (240 x 536px) on the back. .
Mitsu Pro 7 Plus
Since then, we’ve seen quite a few gaming phones feature a secondary rear display, similar to phones like the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra. It could have acted as a viewfinder, but unfortunately it lacked the Always On feature.
The Pro 7 High Edition and Plus used the Helio X30, the last of the X series and MediaTek’s last attempt at a 10-core CPU. The base Pro 7 instead featured a Helio P25 (8-core CPU). The Pro 7 series was also Meizu’s first model with a dual camera, but rather than an ultra-wide or telephoto lens, it was a color + monochrome combination.
Meizu continued to produce interesting designs over the years, but the company was never as big and popular as some of its compatriots. It eventually scaled back its business and released new phones from time to time. Finally, I would like to mention one of his interesting prototypes – the Meizu Zero.
The Meizu Zero prototype was never released commercially
Can you guess why it’s called that? There were no buttons, speakers or charging ports at all. The side buttons were replaced with capacitive sensors, the speakers used piezoelectric transducers, the battery was charged via a proprietary 18W wireless system, and data transfer was via cell networks and Wi-Fi.
HTC U12+ ditched the side button, Sharp and Xiaomi used piezo speakers, and wireless charging was pretty established in 2019. Discard all moving parts at the same time.
With Apple complaining about having USB-C ports on iPhones, many speculate that they want to do away with wired charging ports altogether. This isn’t new speculation, we’ve heard several versions of this rumor over the years.
What happened to Meizu Zero? It got off to a great start, winning an iF Gold Award for its “non-porous” design (Google’s Pixel 4 and 4 XL also won gold that year). However, things fell apart after just a few weeks. Meizu attempted to promote the phone using a crowdfunding campaign on his Indiegogo, setting a modest goal of $100,000.
After two months of campaigning, there were only 29 supporters on the phone. Of those, only 24 of them pre-ordered the phone at the ambitious price of $1,300. Someone got a single “Pioneering Unit” for his $3,000, but I can’t say for certain that someone wasn’t working for his Meizu at the time. A very low funding target, which was not sufficient, and very modest interest, led the company to cancel the project altogether.
Meizu was never short of ambition and when they were doing their own thing, they produced some truly unique designs. I’m not saying they were all great, but they were unique.
We hope the company maintains the same ethos and expands into more markets, and with Geely’s financial backing and global retail footprint, it seems it wants to do just that. Beyond diversification, Meizu is also working on an infotainment software called FlymeAuto to promote vertical integration of the Geely family of products.
Which is your favorite Meizu design? One of the phones above, or one of the phones you skipped? Do you think the Zero concept had merit or was it just a gimmick? ?
