Meizu m1 note Review

Meizu m1 note

 Meizu have been releasing premium looking phones at affordable prices and now they have entered the crowded smartphone market in India,with the launch of Meizu m1 note. The handset is priced at 11,999 INR which is a great deal for such a good handset.
Today we look at the m1 note and see what it has to offer for its price.

Build and Design

Meizu has been late to metal build and most of their flagships are still posing plastic builds with little metal. In M1 note also Meizu has taken to polycarbonate plastic. The phone has lightweight alloy chassis and a unibody plastic body.

It falls in love with the previous generation MX3. The plastic covers the whole phone and there's no visible metal found. Back is curved for better grip and phone feels smaller in hand. The plastic is glossy and looks slippery, but it isn't slippery as it looks and has good grip to hold on.

From the looks we can certainly say that there's a influence of Apple's iPhone here, but Meizu have added some of their unique flavor too. 

The bezels at the front are slim for 5.5" phone , and the halo home button looks similar too iPhone 5's home button but this one is a capacitive home button and has nice look to it with unique gesture controls of meizu's flyme os. Physical buttons located in the same positions for each phone. The power button is on the top right, headphone jack top left and volume controls on the left side. Back she'll isn't removable and single sim slot is provided at the side and there's support for sd card. 

The bottom has grilled speakers with micros USB port on the middle. The rear is similar to a plastic MX4 with wraparound design, camera and a dual tone dual LED flash with Meizu logo at the bottom. 

There's unique optional colors including yellow, pink, blue and green will eventually be made available.

Display

At the front sits a 5.5" 1920 x 1280 full HD IGZO display from Sharp. The display is sharp with 403 ppi and colors pop out brightly. On concern that we found was that at time the display feels warm and there's a slight yellowish tint to it. 

The touch response is fast and accurate. The viewing angles are great, with consistent picture at even extreme angles. 

The display is great and you should enjoy playing games or watching videos without any problems. Meizu has been using amazing displays in their phones and this one is among the top ones out there.

Hardware and performance

Inside M1 note houses a MediaTek MT6572 with 2 GB of RAM. The chipset MT6572 is a 64-bit chip with octa core (8) Cortex a-53 cluster clocked @ 1.7Ghz. Mediatek has been fast progressing in the 64-bit market and this processor is a high performer which can take on snapdragon phones and with more RAM. The performance is top notch with smooth handling and easy multi tasking. Apps open quickly and handles all heavy apps simultaneously with ease. 

In benchmarks the chop performed well with Antutu score of around 41000 and quadrant score of just under 15000. Even with the minor quirks and issues of Flyme os the phone is a very high performer. On gaming and graphic side it has a Mali T760 which can handle high games like asphalt and real racing easily. 

Overall the phones octa core chip and 2GB RAM makes fruitful combination to deliver a high performance device at this low budget price.

Camera

On the back Meizu have implemented a 13MP camera sensor from Samsung rather than market popular Sony. It has an aperture of f/2.2 which seems but small compared to flagship devices. There a dual tone dual LED flash which helps in low light. For selfie geeks there's a 5MP front facing unit also.

The camera on the back takes air good images in the broad day light with nice details. The camera performance decrease as light goes down and the flash should help in low light. The camera app is very impressive with manual and auto modes to take great pictures as let your liking. In auto mode the pictures come great at day light conditions. If you have a good knowledge of photography then manual mode give you great control of your pictures. There's also Panorama and HDR modes. Fur video shooting the quality was just god and not that great.

Software - Flyme OS

The whole hardware is run by Meizu's custom made android the Flyme OS which is a completely different looking and beautifully designed OS. The Flyme os on this phone as it's flagships MX4 is based on Kitkat 4.4 and a scheduled Lollipop coming soon. 

On thing to note here is that Meizu uses the same version of Flyme on all of it phones so you are getting all the features that are supported as on a flagship Meizu phone.

The Flyme OS features lot of gesture and features that makes the handling easy. The overall performance and experience is smooth and feature rich. There are some minor issues here and there which should be easily solved with updates.

Battery and storage

There's a large 3140 mAh battery powering the device. The battery was average and not that great as you expect from such large battery. It might be due to software optimizations and should improve with your usage and future updates. 

There's 16GB of internal storage from which 12GB is user available and no expansion possible as no sd card is supported.

Final Thoughts

The Meizu m1 note lives up to its expectations - good build quality, excellent display, great camera, good UI and performance. It seems like an iPhone rip-off but has its own sets of goodies to offer, and the overall package with its looks and performance is quite impressive, especially at the price point.

It is bound to sway some users away from Xiaomi and OnePlus devices. We will soon find out how the Indian market responds to this new Chinese entrant.