Gadgetory

meizu has always warned the inspiration on their sleeve more so than ever with this year successor to the mx4 and in the past couple of days the affordably priced smartphone market has begun to grow there's a lot of competition out there from big companies trying to construct a perfect smartphone that not only performs well but is reasonably priced well what about a lesser-known company like meizu where does their latest smartphone rank in this field hello everybody this is amazing mx-5 I'm crystal it's nice to meet you guys I've been doing tech reviews for a little over two months now so I'm still getting a hang of things but if you want to know more about me they'll be an about me video coming out soon on this channel so stay tuned for that and let's get on with the review this is the meizu mx4 and i know we're probably all thinking of the same thing hmm this design looks very familiar and yeah it's no secret we're meizu has taken their inspirations from over the years but this phone is definitely beautifully designed with this metal body that curves around to me it's big 5.5 inch display it feels nice to hold to only being seven point six millimeters thick and weighing 149 grams it's actually not that slippery either it always felt safely secure in my hand the meizu mx4 san octa-core 2.2 gigahertz processor with drinking's of ram along with a power VR GPU the phone comes in 16 32 and 64 gig storage variants with no micro SD card slot it also comes in black gold and silver inside we have a 3150 milliamp non-removable battery and it has something called M charge which is supposedly supposed to charge from 0 to 60 in 40 minutes on the back we can find the mx-5 s 20.7 megapixel camera with an F 2.2 aperture lens alongside that is this laser autofocus and dual tone flash on the right side we have both the volume buttons and the power button and they feel pretty tactile and responsive the left side is where the SIM card tray lives and this phone actually allows for 2 SIM cards to be activated within the phone on the top we have our headphone jack and on the bottom we have our microUSB port and the speed the speaker isn't the best sounding speaker but it's definitely not horrible by any means it's just a bit tinny but the volume certainly makes up for this the speaker can be very loud almost as loud as the LG g4 speaker on the front of the phone if you look very closely you can see we have an LED notification light I tried figuring out if I could do any other colors other than white but I'm pretty sure white is our only option here the home button has been redesigned from the mx4 small round button to a bigger more rectangular button it can feel a little cheap sometimes kind of like a toy but it gets the job done even though the awesome notification light is no longer located here and it's sad to see it go it makes a lot of sense because meizu was able to add a fingerprint scanner that they call em touch and it works really well it's super fast and I've never had any issues with it recognising my fingerprint it's much faster than touch ID and maybe even faster than Samsung's at 6:00 the mx-5 has a 5.5 inch HD AMOLED screen made of Gorilla Glass 3 mazie decided to ditch the strange 16 to 10 aspect ratio for the more conventional 16 to 9 ratio which I happily welcome now even though this is only a 1080 by 1920 resolution the display is actually quite beautiful colors really pop and are nice and saturated with this being an AMOLED screen you can expect deep blacks and I guess my only complaint would be the whites are a little warmer with a pinkish hue to them and obviously text is not going to be as sharp as other flagships with a quad HD screen but overall I'm pretty impressed with the mx-5s display now hold on to your hats my friends it's time to talk about the OS of the mx-5 and it's a it's a little different than what most of us are used to makes you put their own take of Android onto the mx-5 called fly me OS and it's not bad it's actually designed quite well but it couldn't look farther from stock Android the mx-5 is running Android 5.0 point 1 but you can never tell by looking at it the settings screen resembles something close to iOS and like I said it's not bad just different and take some time getting used to one thing that can be annoying is that there is no app drawer so you're going to be forced to put all your apps on your homescreen and make folders to organize them also trying to get to the settings menu can be a pain because unlike most smartphones the Settings app cannot be found in the pulldown menu so you'll have to put the Settings app somewhere on your home screen fly me OS was designed to be very simple and it certainly is sometimes almost too much for an Android device but it does come with some cool features like the ability to lock apps so they require a pass code to get into also you might have noticed that yes since the phone has a physical home button well where is the back button and the multitasking button well the back button is the physical home button instead of pressing it just tap it you'll get the vibration feedback and the phone will take you back it's different but it's actually pretty cool and very easy to use as for the multitasking button well it's a little bit harder you have to slowly pull up from the bottom and you get something that looks like the iOS 6 used app dock remember slowly you can't see previews of the apps unfortunately but you can close them by swiping up on them the most important thing about fly me OS is how it performs and it performs great it's super fast and responsive I've never experienced any lag or stuttering from the phone so far absolute quickly and overall just navigating to the phone is just a very pleasant experience and that is just using the phone's balance mode you can choose different power modes for the phone to run in to save battery including power saving mode balance and performance mode I would recommend never changing from balance mode however just because I never really found a reason to change it everything runs smooth maybe for some high graphics gaming performance mode would be ideal but for most games the mx-5 and bounce mode plays beautifully now let's move on to the 20 point seven megapixel camera the camera interface is very simple clean and easy to use you have easy access to a bunch of different modes including full manual mode which I'll get to soon so in auto mode pictures on this phone are actually pretty good I was surprised at how nice they look colors pop and are nice and saturated dynamic range is pretty good but it's pretty much up to you to get it right so even though auto mode should automatically adjust to take the best picture it does need quite a bit of help sometimes tapping the preview obviously does the usual focus and adjustment of light the problem I found is that it's very sensitive so you have to make sure you click exactly where you want the camera to focus and adjust the light to that certain area if you're off just a little bit the picture could go totally dark or way too bright it took some time getting used to I don't think it should take this much trial and error to get a good photo in auto mode but in the end this camera can take some pretty nice pictures HDR does a great job of bringing out the shadows even though it takes a second or two to take the picture and here's a pretty tough shot for any camera with moving balloons and pointing into the sunset but the mx-5 handle it pretty well since HDR takes a little longer to take the picture you will sometimes see ghosting even on slowly moving things like hot-air balloons video is great on the mx-5 to recording at a max of 30 frames per second 4k is also available low-light shots are little noisy and not the most clear but definitely not bad they are pretty dark still with the 2.2 aperture lens it's what I would usually expect from a sub $400 phone the front facing five megapixel camera is pretty good and pictures have a great amount of detail it seems to really prioritize the main subject of the photo and make anything slightly in the background a little blurry than most selfie cameras but overall it takes pretty good pictures like I was saying before there are a lot of different shooting modes some are silly and some are kind of cool you can have a lot of fun with this camera there's manual mode with shutter speed ISO exposure and focus panorama does a full 360 and stiches things together very well light field mode takes a bunch of photos very fast at different focus points allowing you to adjust the focus after the shot was taken the mx-5 can record slow-mo at 100 frames per second and even though that's not as slow as some flagships out there the quality is definitely a lot better at 720p beauty mode is where it can get a little weird you can choose to make your eyes as big as you would like or even make your face a bit slimmer smoothness is there and whitening which I thought would just make your teeth whiter but it makes your whole face whiter it's silly it's stupid but it can be fun so if it's non quad HD AMOLED mean and decently sized 3150 milliamp battery you should be able to rely on this phone to get you through the day right well in my case yes I haven't been able to kill the battery in a day no matter what I do whether I'm slightly browsing the internet responding to texts going through Instagram or taking photos all day and watching HD YouTube videos battery life tends to be the same I was able to get four hours to four and a half hours of screen on time pretty much every day there seems to be something weird going on with the phone idling taking up a lot of the battery consumption it's usually number one on the list it's not much to moan and groan over since battery life is already pretty great but I just can't help to imagine how amazing it would be without this bug in the end I was pleasantly surprised by the meizu mx4 to keep this phone from emptying your wallets there are some compromises sure the display isn't the best but it definitely looks nice and will help save some power and yes the home button is a little bit cheap but it's a home button back button fingerprint scanner and power button all-in-one in the end the features that matter and that should work do work and they work beautifully once you get past some of the cosmetic differences the meizu mx4 is a fantastic phone it performs well has a reliable battery and a nice camera even though this area of phones is starting to become crowded with some other great options for less than $400 I'd say the mx-5 is a great Buy thanks for watching guys tell me in the comments below what you think about this phone do you like it or do you not and make sure you subscribe to android authority for my about me video coming out soon follow me on snapchat Instagram and Twitter if you like and I'll see you later