Gadgetory

no notch no hole punch display no pop-up mechanism and yet a stunning full screen display but is this phone as a whole worth it's $500 ish asking price this is Bailey Stein with Android authority you're watching our video review of the meizu 16 s on the outside the 16 s isn't much different from its predecessor the 16th overall the design is quite minimalistic our carbon black model is stealthy but you can certainly spice things up with the other color options the phone has a slim profile at seven point six millimeters and 165 grams the 16 s features an in display fingerprint reader which works quite well it is optical though meaning it shines light up as you scan your finger which can be kind of annoying at night if you'd rather the 16 s also supports face unlock and it's really really quick easily rivaling the fingerprint reader speed as for what's missing here well first off the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack to be fair Maisie makes a strong argument that this was necessary in order to fit a larger battery the 16 s is also missing water resistance and wireless charging the latter of which makes me even more frustrated with the glass back as the coating they're using makes the phone unbelievably slippery I unintentionally conducted a dozen or so drought tests during the few weeks I use the 16s and think one of them is to blame for the deep scratch that developed on my units front display quite frankly I think you'd have to be a little crazy to use this phone without a case as for the front display it's a 6.2 inch 1080p AMOLED panel the phone still fits comfortably in the hand though thanks to its curved corners and a 91.5 three percent screen to body ratio as for the display quality Samsung actually custom-made this panel for meizu and the colors are expectedly rich with pretty good sunlight readability to Mesa really hit a homerun in this category performances also top-notch and is undoubtedly on par with other flagship level smartphones Mizzou has been talking a lot about their one mind 3.0 AI engine recently which is basically just a bunch of software tweaks designed to make the phone feel faster it's hard to objectively test this but I can say the 16s consistently launched my favorite apps quickly and it never seemed to miss a beat overall with this iteration meizu increase the battery size significantly from three thousand to three thousand six hundred milliamp hours overall battery life is great but not exceptional I was consistently able to get a full day of moderate to heavy use with 5 to 6 hours of screen on time my biggest issue here is with the software's aggressive smart background / app setting for basically every single app I wanted to receive notifications from I had to go in and manually disable this which quickly became annoying the global variant of the meizu 16 s should work well with most non-chinese LTE networks particularly in Europe however I wouldn't recommend it for use in the US well I stayed connected to t-mobile's band for LTE for most of my review period well you know what occasionally drop down to 2g or just lose service entirely moving onto the cameras the 16s features - on the back the primary is 48 megapixel F 1.7 with oh is and the secondary is 20 megapixel F 2.6 when lightning is good these cameras are good the 16s produces images with a pleasant color profile one that's not too flat but not too unnaturally saturated either basically you get accurate images with colors with just the right amount of punch dynamic range is also pretty good I did however notice the 16s struggle with processing things like bright red colors in a few cases it also didn't correct for white balance as much as I would have liked finally while the software portrait mode has gotten better it can still be hit or miss meizu says the secondary sensor enables three times lossless zoom but I'm going to push back on that claim photo shot at three times zoom simply aren't as good almost always they come out over sharpened and with dual colors this quality discrepancy is even more noticeable in low-light overall low-light photos are generally decent the 16s is able to maintain most colors but does struggle with detail there also tends to be a fair bit of noise but that's when shooting in the standard mode meizu actually just introduced a super night mode which performs significantly better by combining up to 17 frames into a single image compared to Google's nitesite on the pixel 3xl meizu super night actually seems to have an advantage when a moderate amount of light is available google's night sight tends to really bump up the shadows at the expense of blowing out the highlights whereas mazes super night is more modest by bumping up the shadows but keeping the details in the highlights meizu says it will ship the 16s with fly me 7.3 over Android 9.0 in the past I've really enjoyed using fly me for its clean design making it one of the best among Chinese manufacturers and while I still like the design here I think it's time for Amazo to refresh it a bit as for extra features I really like the quick app launcher on the home screen the navigation options are also really good I think Google should just straight-up copy them for Android cue actually but you better not care about future versions of Android if you decide to go with the 16s as there's like a zero percent chance that it ever gets updated and to make matters worse mezzo has sparingly provided global users with the same fly me skin updates that they frequently release for their Chinese users and that's really unfortunate because when we made this video the 16s the software was riddled with bugs presumably Mesa will be announcing pricing and availability for global markets soon for reference the maze of 16s costs 3200 UN or about 462 dollars for the 6 128 gigabyte model and 3500 UN or about 506 dollars for the 8 128 gigabyte model in China all things considered the Mesa 16s has the potential to be a great choice if Mesa can get their software act together but as it stands it feels like Mizzou has quite frankly neglected their global users that combined with strong competition makes the 16s a tough sell be sure to check out our full written review for more details subscribe to our YouTube channel if you haven't already give this video a thumbs up and remember we are your source for all things Android