Meizu has had a fascinating background, but after several rough years, it took itself out of the mobile phone market. Since it's under the wing of car-maker Geely, the company is positioned to earn its return with the introduction of the Meizu 20 collection on March 30. As that is still a couple of weeks away, let's take a look back at Meizu's most fascinating phones while we delay.
The company was established in 2003 and at first made MP3 gamers. Its first telephone was revealed in January 2007. It was dubbed the Meizu M8, and it ran "MyMobile" software based upon Windows CE 6.0. However, getting the phone to market proved to be a huge issue. Meizu brought the M8 to CeBIT in March 2008, over a year after first revealing it, and it was still in a prototype phase with barely functioning software. But that was just the beginning of the M8's troubles.
In accordance with Apple's attorneys, it bears more than a passing similarity to the iPhone. After an emergency situation revamp, the telephone also changed its name to the "mini One." The lawsuits' fight continued, and M8 manufacturing was eventually stopped in 2010 and all sales were banned.
The Meizu M9 was introduced in very early 2011, and it was the company's first Android telephone. This model was powered by the Samsung Hummingbird chipset, a year after the initial Galaxy S used it. This was just the beginning of Meizu's connection with Samsung.
This was complied with by the Meizu MX, which was also the first official release of the greatly personalized Android skin known as "Flyme OS." The MX also used an Exynos chip and featured a sharp 4.0" qHD display. Meizu was still freely obtaining Apple's designs, as we kept in mind in our review.
Avoiding over to the Meizu MX3, its specialty was that it was the first mobile phone with 128 GB of integrated storage space. That was a great deal for 2013. And if you will permit us a small detour, front runners ten years later should have greater than 128GB of base storage space—there, we said it. Incidentally, this telephone used the Exynos 5410 Octa (also known as the Galaxy S4 chipset). Meizu was probably the greatest Exynos customer beyond Samsung itself.
The company opened up to new providers, and the Meizu MX4 from late 2014 was its first to use a MediaTek chipset. It had an attractive 5.36" bezel-less display (on the sides, at least), offered great battery life and sound quality, and the 20.7MP video cam was strong too.
At this moment, Meizu's key issue was that its phones were fairly unknown beyond China each time the similarities between Xiaomi and OnePlus were broadening quickly.
2014's Meizu M1 Keep in Mind is also deserving of attention; this was the first of the affordable Keep in Mind collection. Despite its fairly weak MediaTek MT6762 chipset that just had Cortex-A53 cores, the 5.5" 1080p display used an elegant IGZO panel (however, its quality was not quite comparable to that on Sharp phones).
Alright, we will skip to the great stuff. The Meizu Professional 5 was an enviable frontrunner; its steel unibody was sleek, as was the 2.5D Gorilla Glass on the front that rested over the 5.7" AMOLED display (1080p).
This telephone was powered by the Exynos 7420 Octa. A couple of months earlier, Samsung introduced its Galaxy S6, keeping that exact chip and just that chip (Qualcomm was actually having a minute in 2015). The Sony-made 16 MP video camera on the back boasted OIS and produced outstanding pictures. We wrapped up our review by saying that the Meizu Professional 5 was an easy telephone to suggest, so individuals could actually buy one—Meizu's circulation network was still seriously lacking compared with its competitors.
After that, in 2016, came the Meizu Professional 6. It was smaller in size compared to its predecessor with a 5.2" Very AMOLED display but no less premium (steel body, Gorilla Glass 4, 3D Touch, you name it). However, the reason we remember this model is various: it was among the few phones that used MediaTek's Helio X25, an unusual chipset with a 10-core CPU.
The three-cluster design had 2 Cortex-A72 (2.5 GHz), 4 A53 (2.0 GHz), and 4 more A53 (1.4 GHz). This beat most Android phones in multi-core benchmarks, however not all (significantly the Galaxy S7 side and Huawei P9 bordered it out in our testing, also so simply). The Mali-T880 MP4 GPU underperformed in contrast, however.
The Helio X20 was a previously 10-core design (same equipment, but the A72 set ran at 2.3GHz), and a couple of months later, Meizu used it in the more affordable MX6. There was also the Meizu Professional 6 Plus after that, which changed over to the Exynos 8890 Octa, the same chipset as the Galaxy S7 used previously in 2016. The Plus featured a 5.7" QHD display (also with 3D touch).
Meizu constantly had a propensity for "package thinking," at the very least when it had not been attempting to copy the iPhone. The Meizu Professional 7 and Professional 7 Plus were introduced in mid-2017, and besides having actual 5.2" FHD and 5.7" QHD Very AMOLED displays on the front, specifically, they also had 2" AMOLED displays on their backs (240 x 536 px).
We've seen numerous video-game PC phones feature an additional back display ever since, as well as phones such as the Xiaomi Mi 11 Extremely. This display could work as a viewfinder when taking selfies with the main webcamera, but sadly it did not have "constantly on" functionality.
The Professional 7 High version and the Plus used the Helio X30, the last of the X-series and MediaTek's last attempt at a 10-core CPU. The base Professional 7 system featured a Helio P25 (8-core CPU). The Professional 7 collection was also the very first time Meizu brought a dual-camera, however, it was a color and monochrome combination instead of an extremely wide or telephoto lens.
Meizu continued producing fascinating designs throughout the years, but the company never ever expanded as big or as popularly as some of its competitors. It eventually injured down procedures, launching a brand-new telephone every after that and currently. Before we conclude, we wanted to mention one fascinating model: the Meizu No.
Can you guess why it is called that? It had exactly no switches, audio speakers, or billing ports. The side switches were changed by capacitive sensing units, the audio speaker used a piezoelectric transducer, the battery was billed over an exclusive 18W cordless system, and information transfers were done over cell networks and Wi-Fi.
None of that was unseen formerly; e.g., the HTC U12+ did away with the side switches; Sharp and Xiaomi had piezo audio speakers; and cordless billing was pretty well established in 2019. However, this was the first telephone to integrate all these in one place while at the same time discarding all moving components.
With Apple's grumbling about placing a USB-C port on its iPhones, many hypothesize that it wants to drop the wired billing port entirely. This is hardly a brand-new conjecture; we've been listening to some variation of this report for many years. But if it actually does it, this will be an unusual opportunity for Meizu to say, "We did it first."
Whatever occurred with the Meizu No? It began off great, winning an iF Gold Honor for its "non-porous" design (Google's Pixel 4 and 4 XL also picked up Gold honors that year). However, points collapsed simply weeks later: Meizu was using a crowd-funding project on Indiegogo to try and advertise the telephone, and it set a moderate objective of $100,000.
After 2 months of campaigning, the telephone had simply 29 backers, just 24 of whom actually pre-ordered the telephone at the, let's say enthusiastic, price of $1,300. Someone picked up the solitary "Introducing Unit" at $3,000; however, we can't promise that said someone has not been operating at Meizu at the moment. Despite the very reduced financing objective, that had not been enough, and the very muted rate of passion led the company to terminate the project entirely.
Meizu never did not have aspiration when it was doing its own thing; it produced some really unique designs. We're not saying that any of them were great, but they were unique.
We hope that the company maintains the same spirit as it expands to more markets; with Geely's monetary support and worldwide retail impact, it appears to want to do just that. Geely's rate of passion exceeds diversifying its profile, and Meizu is functioning on an infomercial software dubbed FlymeAuto, which will advertise upright integration in the Geely family of items.
Which is your favorite Meizu design—among the phones we mentioned or among the ones we skipped? And do you think that the "no" idea had merit or that it was simply a trick?
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