China is slowly getting known in the world of mobile electronics with its introduction of Meizu phones. This company has been around since 2003 and is presently testing the waters of the quad-core smart phone industry with the release of the MX 4-Core smart phone.
This touchscreen phone’s design is more or less similar to its predecessor’s, the Meizu MX. Looking at the device closely, especially the front panel, one can say that a lot of its design concept was taken from the IPhone 3G/3Gs with very little deviations here and there. This phone was released August of this year about 7 months after its MX series predecessor was introduced in the market.
Specifications
The Meizu MX 4-Core relies on a quad-core 1.4 GHz A9 Cortex with a new Exynos chipset. Graphics power is courtesy of the Mali-400MP unit. There is an absence of a memory card slot which means that the users planning on owning this phone should be satisfied with the 16 GB and 32 GB variant of this phone. The 4-inch ASV capacitive touchscreen display is capable of displaying resolutions of up to 640 X 960 pixels and also supports multi-touch. Media capture is taken care of by its 8 MP rear camera with single led flash and a secondary VGA camera. The bottom, up, and side panels are where the micro-USB port, power button and 3.5 mm jack with mic , and the volume rocker are located respectively
Pros
Meizu spiced up Andoid 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich’s flavor with the Flyme OS interface which has features that are quite similar to iOS. For example, app icons can only be seen in the home pages since Flyme lacks an application drawer.
The way to accessing the task manager and killing apps is strikingly similar to that of the IPhone and is very easy to use. There are also many unique functions that are scattered all throughout the OS like the presence of the Flyme Sync and Flyme Store as examples. Also, the camera application transforms the volume into camera hardware buttons.
The good thing about the MX 4-Core is that it has a very reasonable price. It is probably the cheapest quad core phone around.
Cons
With the kind of price that this phone is available in, it is not surprising to see old or a bit outdated features on this phone like the VGA secondary camera and the lack of autocorrect function for its keyboard app.
The pricing on this device gives consumers a clue that there’s a catch. The software on this phone still has got some serious performance issues since there are still a lot of bugs waiting to be fixed. This is disappointing for a quad core device. Running on a 1700 mah battery also limits fun time on this device because it runs out easily.
Conclusion
Overall, a very cheap quad core device is just too good to be true. Also, Meizu has a propensity for ripping off popular mobile device designs. However, if the company can come up with fine-looking devices such as these, even for rip-offs, it’s only a matter of time when they can come up with one that they have truly invested in.
Although this phone looks good and is affordable, there are plenty of loop holes that need to be resolved first. First, if Meizu support teams are able to iron out the bugs on this device to optimize the quad processors, then the MX 4-Core can be quite powerful.
Next, in terms of design and user interface, the phone could use a little bit (a lot!) of originality from the manufacturer. In order to be successful in this market, Meizu should offer something that is unique and original rather than compiling bits and pieces of what’s already out there.
