Gadgetory

if there's one thing that's become very clear in the last say six months Chinese manufacturers are really looking to take over the smartphone space with great offerings that prove that they can create wonderful Android smartphones and slowly but surely they are coming to the west so in this Chinese movement we have seen a lot of great offerings from people like Oppo and also Huawei but at CES we saw a great flagship phone from meizu and we wanted to show you what it was all about hey it's Josh regard from Andhra Authority what's going on everybody and this is the meizu mx4 now before we even get started I will say this yes a lot of you out there are right in saying that when you take a first look at the mx3 by meizu you can pretty much tell where some of its inspirations come but even if that is the case and if that is where your mind goes when you look at this phone that doesn't take away from the fact that it is still a really good looking device so to all of that I say so what the black front is only interrupted by a simple white circle down at the bottom which works as the home button and is also a very elegant way of showing the LED notification light the other buttons take on a somewhat different layout from much of the rest of the Android space as the volume rocker is on the left side and the power button is up on the top the back of the phone takes on a glossy plastic look that can be fingerprint prone and they will show up depending on what color you pick of the mx3 as it comes in a bunch of different colors and holding this all together first is a magnesium alloy back panel that is supposed to help with the cooling and the dissipation of heat and then after that the frame itself is made of stainless steel now what is really nice and is quite a feat in regards to all of the metal that is actually supposed to be inside of this phone it makes for a device that actually isn't all that heavy to begin with it is very nimble in the hand and especially with that curve on the back it allows for very easy handling as it rests really nicely in your palm and then when you're reaching around on the 5.1 inch screen on the front actually doesn't feel that difficult at all speaking of that screen it is like I said 5.1 inches and comes with a somewhat unique resolution of 1,800 by 1080 whereas the general 1080p resolution will come in 1920 by 1080 so it is a little bit unique but it still comes in at 412 pixels per inch which makes all text still look very nice and that resolution does mean that videos will have a bit of a letterbox effect with black bars on the top in the bottom but otherwise the color looks really great coming from this LCD screen with wonderful viewing angles to boots what we probably love most about this screen is the very small bezel especially on the sides as you can see here they're just really thin which means they were able to pack such a large screen onto this device and still keep it from getting any larger than it needed to be when it comes to power the mx3 has no problems with that at all as it may not come with a Snapdragon processor like we see with a lot of flagship devices but what could be considered the next best thing and of course that would be from Samsung's Exynos 5 octa which brings a whole course of power to this handset after that it is powered by power VR SGX graphics and 2 gigabytes of RAM for multitasking now given that the fly me operating system itself is a pretty different type of operating system that has a lot of elements specifically built by meizu from the ground up it would be no surprise to us if optimization was a big factor in what has become a very smooth experience on here especially with all of the transitions and the software itself you really don't get any sense at all that there's lag on this phone and you're able to get everything you need done pretty easily now while the mx2 you might not have expandable storage you do have the option of getting a 16 32 64 or 128 gigabytes worth of it onboard so that's a really nice option and also this version of the MX 3 that I'm holding here is basically made for Europe and as such it does come with HSDPA connectivity out of the box LTE is not available so hopefully when versions of this come to the west we will see it have LTE support so you can take advantage of your high-speed networks and as far as call quality goes I use this on the t-mobile network here in the United States and I found no problems when it came to the sound quality the call quality and more importantly there were no dropped calls at all when it comes to the battery 2400 milliamp hours in terms of capacity might seem a little bit low these days in the Android space and unfortunately that is true especially for the mx3 I never really got any more than maybe eight to ten hours out of it when I'm constantly using it under moderately heavy usage that means even with the power saving on which is just an option doesn't give you much customization of the power saving you probably will only be able to get about a day out of this phone even if you try to not use it too much the real story with this particular phone however is its audio output as it is outfitted with a Wolfson audio chip that's supposed to provide even better audio processing and then after that a speaker system that even if it doesn't necessarily look all that great it's supposed to provide good dimension in the sound now in our testing we did play a lot of music on this phone and I do have to admit that it provides a very nice rich sound there's actually some bass to this tiny little speaker on the back and it's very very pleasant all right now let's move on to the camera which is a 8 megapixel performer with a low f 2.0 aperture made for low-light shots and for the most part it does its job but before we get into that the app is pretty simplistic with all of the elements on the right side and some options are available within for some creativity like a macro mode which you'll see in a bit and also some manual controls are available now when it came to auto focusing it really wasn't the best because we could be pointing the camera at a particular scene and it wouldn't really auto focus at all generally we have to touch to focus but thankfully it does do so quite quickly now what's really nice is the gesture capture it's just a really cool feature that allows you to wave your hand over the proximity sensor at the top of the phone that way you don't worry about pressing down buttons or creating some sort of shake by actually pressing the key on the viewfinder itself now quality is a bit hit-and-miss though I will admit it's generally hid the colours do look really good and the details come through the photo however once you zoom in a little bit you will see that the noise levels are still pretty high it's not the sharpest image that you'll find but we will say that we've seen much worse in terms of noise levels and other phones you also might get a slightly overexposed shot from time to time probably more often than you would want but overall this is a very capable performer and is actually quite a bit of fun to use especially with that gesture capture feature all right now we're going to get into the software which might take a little bit of time to talk about because it is vastly different from many of the other Android systems that we've seen out there now in this particular case we could say that the fly me OS at 3.0 which is what was debuted on the MX 3 is a bit of a mash up yes it does have iOS 7 elements and there especially its flat look and those merge with what is ostensibly in Android shell to make a very basically gesture heavy interface which is interesting the home button is where everything is centred around obviously and it simplifies things but also makes other buttons soft keys but even if they are soft keys they are pretty brilliantly collected in a bar just above the home button gestures center around the home button as well if you swipe up away from the home button you will bring up a line of your recent apps and then if you swipe up starting from home you have to touch home on the way up it will emulate a back button in most cases but also is a nice way to quickly unlock the phone without having to use the power button up top now as far as the general interface goes this flat design does come with many unique ways of expressing what are otherwise very familiar elements of Android the volume indicator is really understated the notification drop-down doesn't come all the way down it only comes down as far as the number of notifications it is displaying and then of course there is the settings page which is just a long line down of different tabs for various functions now simplification is something that's always welcomed to us here at Android or 'ti however a simplification can sometimes come at a cost when it comes to the mx3 it unfortunately has to do with function swipe up from the bottom and you do get a list of your various recent apps and you are able to switch between them very easily however you don't get really any previews of what those apps are doing in the background so you don't get that kind of Nexus or KitKat type of functionality and not even that you can't do it much else when it comes to multitasking except switch between the two simplification also meant for the general design of the phone doing away with the app drawer which is always an interesting choice given that a lot of us Android users really kind of rely on the app drawer for organization literally all of your apps and widgets will appear on the home screens making folders does help and overall be good design keeps it from looking actually cluttered or even unattractive which is nice but in the worst case scenario you probably will just have to install a custom launcher and finally when it comes to price we did hear from a zoo that they're planning on bringing the MX 3 to the west at a competitive price point now what that is exactly we don't really know but if you need to get your hands on this phone before it comes out in the West you can find it at the base model for under five hundred dollars now considering that a lot of other flagship Android handsets come in at over $600 you can say that for all that this phone is capable of doing that is a bit of a steal and so there you have it the meizu mx4 term that I can't help but think I know a lot of you out there think it as well made in China well that's a term that unfortunately has been saddled with a negative connotation in recent years especially in regards to quality however what we can tell you is I in the smartphone space companies in China are making moves to reverse this notion and to be honest we think that especially with offerings like the mx3 they are definitely succeeding and to be honest we're all really excited to see that movement come stateside as always thank you guys very much for watching and hope you enjoyed this review of the meizu mx4 chinese companies as they're coming to the US we already have a lot of good offerings already and it could only get better from here so keep it tuned to android authority for all of the best coverage of those and the rest of the android space for the best reviews comparisons and weekly shows by the likes of joe JS and of course we also have great content from kevin in the tech ninja so all of us here at android authority want to thank you once again for watching and make sure that you keep it tuned here subscribe to our channel if you haven't already because we are your source for all things Android