Meizu has had an interesting history and after several turbulent years withdrew from the smartphone market. Now under the wing of automaker Geely, the company is all set to make its comeback with the launch of the Meizu 20 series on March 30th. interesting phones while we wait.
The company was founded in 2003 and initially produced MP3 players. Its first phone was introduced in January 2007. It was dubbed the Meizu M8 and ran the Windows CE 6.0-based “Mymobile” software. However, getting the phone to market proved to be a major problem. Meizu brought the M8 to CeBIT in March 2008, more than a year after first announcing it, and it was still in the prototype stage with barely functional software. But that was only the beginning of the M8’s woes.
According to Apple’s lawyers, it bore more than a passing resemblance to the iPhone. After an emergency redesign, the phone also changed its name to “miniOne”. The legal battle continued and M8 production was eventually stopped in 2010 and all sales banned.
Meizu M8: original design • restyling (image source)
The Meizu M9 was launched in early 2011 and was the company’s first Android phone. This model was powered by the Samsung Hummingbird chipset, one year after the original Galaxy S used it. This was just the beginning of Meizu’s relationship with Samsung.
This was followed by the Meizu MX, which was also the first official release of the heavily customized Android skin known as “Flyme OS”. The MX also used an Exynos chip and featured a sharp 4.0-inch qHD display. Meizu was still openly borrowing from Apple’s designs, as we noted in our review.
Meizu MX
Moving on to the Meizu MX3, its claim to fame was that it was the first smartphone with 128GB of inbuilt storage. That was a lot for 2013. And if you’ll allow us a little detour, flagships 10 years later should have more than 128GB of base storage — there, we said it. By the way, this phone used the Exynos 5410 Octa (aka Galaxy S4 chipset). Meizu was undoubtedly the largest Exynos customer outside of Samsung itself.
Meizu MX3
The company has opened up to new suppliers, and the Meizu MX4 from late 2014 was the first to use a MediaTek chipset. It had an eye-catching 5.36-inch bezel-less display (at least on the sides), offered great battery life and audio quality, and the 20.7MP camera was solid too.
Meizu’s key problem at this point was that its phones were relatively unknown outside of China at a time when brands like Xiaomi and OnePlus were expanding rapidly.
Meizu MX4
The Meizu M1 Note of 2014 is also worthy of attention, this was the first in the budget Note series. Despite its relatively weak MediaTek MT6762 chipset that only had Cortex-A53 cores, the 5.5-inch 1080p display used a sleek IGZO panel (although its quality wasn’t as good as on Sharp phones).
Note Meizu M1
Ok, let’s move on to the really good stuff. The Meizu Pro 5 was an enviable flagship – its metal unibody was sleek, as was the 2.5D Gorilla Glass on the front that sat atop the 5.7-inch AMOLED (1080p) display.
This phone was powered by the Exynos 7420 Octa. A few months earlier Samsung launched its Galaxy S6 with that exact chip and only that chip (Qualcomm was having a moment in 2015). Sony’s 16MP camera sensor on the back boasted OIS and produced impressive images. We concluded our review by saying that the Meizu Pro 5 was an easy phone to recommend, if only people could actually buy one – Meizu’s distribution network was still sorely lacking compared to the competition.
Meizu Pro 5
Then in 2016 came the Meizu Pro 6. 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, you name it). However, the reason we remember this model is different: it was one of the very few phones that used MediaTek’s Helio X25, a rare chipset with a 10-core CPU.
Meizu Pro 6
The three-cluster design featured two Cortex-A72s (2.5GHz), four A53s (2.0GHz), and four more A53s (1.4GHz). This beat most Android phones in multi-core benchmarks, though not all (notably the Galaxy S7 edge and Huawei P9 outperformed it in our tests, albeit only by a narrow margin). However, the Mali-T880 MP4 GPU underperformed in comparison.
The Helio X20 was an earlier 10-core design (same hardware, but the A72 pair ran at 2.3GHz) and a few months later Meizu used it in the cheaper MX6. Then there was also the Meizu Pro 6 Plus, which upgraded to the Exynos 8890 Octa, the same chipset as the Galaxy S7 used in early 2016. The Plus featured a 5.7-inch QHD display (also with 3D touch ).
Meizu MX6 and Meizu Pro 6 Plus
Meizu has always had a tendency to think outside the box, at least when it wasn’t trying to copy the iPhone. The Meizu Pro 7 and Pro 7 Plus were launched in mid-2017 and besides having respectively 5.2″ FHD and 5.7″ QHD Super AMOLED displays on the front, they also had 2″ AMOLED displays on the back (240 x 536px).
Meizu Pro 7 Plus
We’ve since seen quite a few gaming phones featuring a secondary rear display, as well as phones like the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra. This display could function as a viewfinder when taking selfies with the main cam, but unfortunately it lacked the Always On feature.
The Pro 7 high edition and Plus used the Helio X30, the latest in the X series and MediaTek’s latest attempt at a 10-core CPU. The base Pro 7 featured a Helio P25 (8-core CPU) instead. The Pro 7 series was also the first time Meizu introduced a dual camera, although it was a color + monochrome combination rather than an ultra wide-angle or telephoto lens.
Meizu has continued to churn out interesting designs over the years, but the company has never grown as big and as popular as some of its compatriots. Eventually he stopped operations, releasing a new phone every now and then. Before concluding, we want to mention an interesting prototype: the Meizu Zero.
The Meizu Zero prototype has never seen a commercial release
Can you guess why it’s called that? It had exactly zero buttons, speakers, or charging ports. The side buttons were replaced by capacitive sensors, the speaker used a piezoelectric transducer, the battery was charged via a proprietary 18W wireless system, data transfers were carried out via cellular and Wi-Fi networks.
None of this had ever been seen before, for example the HTC U12+ got rid of the side buttons, Sharp and Xiaomi had piezoelectric speakers, wireless charging was pretty well established in 2019. However, this was the first phone to combine all of these in one place while simultaneously throwing away all moving parts.
With Apple rumbling about putting a USB-C port on its iPhones, many are speculating that it wants to ditch the wired charging port altogether. This is hardly new speculation, we’ve been hearing some version of this rumor for years now. But if it really does, this will be a rare occasion for Meizu to say “we did it first”.
What happened to the Meizu Zero? It got off to a strong start, winning an iF Gold Award for its “non-porous” design (Google’s Pixel 4 and 4 XL also won Gold awards that year). However, things fell apart a few weeks later: Meizu was using an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to try and promote the phone, and set a modest goal of $100,000.
After two months of campaigning, the phone had just 29 backers, only 24 of whom actually pre-ordered the phone at the, shall we say ambitious, price of $1,300. Someone picked up the single “Pioneering Unit” for $ 3,000, although we can’t promise that someone didn’t work for Meizu at the time. Even with the super low funding goal that wasn’t enough and very low interest led the company to cancel the project altogether.
Meizu has never lacked ambition and when it did its own thing, it produced some truly unique designs. We’re not saying they were all good, but they were unique.
We hope the company keeps the same spirit and expands into more markets – with financial backing from Geely and a worldwide retail footprint, it appears to be doing just that. Geely’s interest goes beyond diversifying its portfolio, Meizu is working on an infotainment software called FlymeAuto, which will promote vertical integration into the Geely product family.
What is your favorite Meizu design – one of the phones we mentioned above or one we skipped? And do you think the concept of Zero had merit or was it just a gimmick?
Start a new Thread