Sleek, slim and very strong

STRAIGHT OUT OF China to welcome the New Year comes the Meizu MX5, a sleek 4G smartphone with a strong build, good performance and impressive camera as well as an attractive price.

The MX5’s all-metal body is enhanced by a 3D sand-blasting technique and a five-step anodising process before being finely polished, making it sturdy, sleek and comfortable to hold. And despite its metal shell, the MX5 is a skinny 7.6mm and weighs just 149 grammes.

It’s powered by the MediaTek Helio X10 Turbo octa-core processor, an ARM Cortex-A53 with all cores running at 2.2 GHz. The graphics horsepower comes from a PowerVR G6200 GPU.

Performance is enhanced with a generous 3 gigabytes of LPDDR3 RAM or working memory and 32 GB of internal storage without any expansion slot.

The smartphone runs on Google Android 5.0.1 operating system with Meizu’s own Flyme OS 4.5.4 interface on top. The latter is simple and intuitive to use and even boasts its own music player that supports high-resolution audio songs. The interface provides convenient access to your files as well as a Security app to protect your smartphone against viruses and malware attacks. It also serves to free up the phone’s system memory and cleans up junk files so that the phone retains its good performance.

The MX5 comes with a gorgeous 5.5-inch AMOLED display with Full HD resolution of 1080x1920 pixels. The screen is readable under sunlight as it has 10,000:1 contrast ratio and 350 nits of brightness. The MX5’s display is powered by the MiraVision display engine, which dynamically adjusts the brightness in accordance with the light environment, such as under sunlight or in low light conditions.

The display, which is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3, is very good for watching video clips and viewing photos as well as for reading e-books, mails and web pages.

The MX5 performed well in the test, with its touch screen and menus very responsive and the screen scrolling fast. All applications ran fast and smoothly. It also played large files of full hi-res audio songs of FLAC 24bit/192kHz without any performance hiccups.

I particularly enjoyed using the phone as a hi-res audio player, testing it with Sony MDR-1ABT hi-res audio headphones and being blown away by the great details and powerful bass. The music app also boasts an HD quality mode that supports several hi-res audio headphones though sadly mine were not on the list.

I tested the MX5 on TrueMove H’s LTE 4G network and I was impressed by the fast connection speed. My snapshots were posted to my Facebook wall in no time and backed up to my Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage very fast.

I used the Ookla speedtest app to measure to connection speed and found that it achieved a download speed of 49.85 Mbps and upload speed of 21.46 Mbps.

The MX5 has dual nano SIM slots and both slots support 4G connection though only one slot can be connected to your 4G/3G connection at any one time. The other is used for 2G voice connection.

The MX5 produces impressive snapshots thanks to the Sony IMX220 image sensor, which is used in Sony's Xperia Z3 smartphone.

The sensor has 20.7 effective pixels and has good low-light performance. The main camera uses customised 6P blue film lens with a f/2.2 aperture. The sensor and lens are combined with the brand new DM3.0 image algorithm to provide improved performance in skin colour treatment and low light noise reduction.

Laser distance measuring gives the MX5 fast auto-focusing – just 0.2 seconds within a range of 50cm, no matter if it is bright or dark.

The camera also uses a new circular two-tone flash to provide a photographic effect approaching natural light thanks to an intelligent high/low colour temperature flash intensity selection.

The main camera has shooting modes of macro, auto, manual, beauty, panorama, light field, scan, and slow motion. The slow motion mode is for capturing 720p video at the rate of 100 frames per second. The MX5 is also capable of capturing 4K ultra HD video clips. The scan mode is for scanning documents.

During the test, I used the auto mode and I could capture sharp and clean photos in most lighting environments, including night shots. 

The 5-megapixel front camera is equipped with a large f//2.0 aperture lens and uses FotoNation 2.0 intelligent beautification for making your selfies outstanding.

The MX5 is also equipped with a brand-new fingerprint identification system: the mTouch 2.0. The system allows you to scan five fingers to unlock the screen simply by touching the home button. You are also required to set a four-digit pin in case you are unable to unlock the phone with your fingerprints. The fingerprint scanner worked effectively during my test.

The smartphone comes with 3,150 mAh bettery and mCharge fast-charging technology, which recharges the battery by up to 25 per cent within 10 minutes, and up to 60 per cent within 40 minutes.

The MX5 also supports fast wireless connection of the Wi-Fi 802.11 ac protocol. I tested it with Linksys WRT 1200AC and its connection was fast.

Meizu MX5 is available in grey, silver white, and silver black and retails for Bt10,990.

 

Key Specs

- Network: GSM: 900/1800/1900, WCDNA: 2100/1900/900, LTE FDD: 2100/180

- OS: Android 5.0.1 with Flyme OS 4.5.4 interface

- Processor: MediaTek Helio X10 Turbo processor ARM Cortex-A53 2.2 GHz x 8

- GPU: PowerVR G6200 

- Memory: 3GB LPDDR3 RAM

- Storage: 32GB

- Display: 5.5-inch AMOLED with 1080x1920 pixel resolution, Corning Gorilla Glass 3

- Cameras: Main: 20.7 MP Sony IMX220 image Exmor RS CMOS sensor with f/2.2 lens, Front: 5MP sensor with f/2.0 lens

- Wireless connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11 ac/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, Digital compass

- Sensors: Hall Effect sensor, Gravity sensor, IR proximity sensor, Gyroscope, Ambient light sensor, Touch sensor, Digital compass

- Video formats supported: MP4, 3GP, MOV, MKV, AVI, FLV, MPEG

- Audio formats supported: FLAC, APE, AAC, MKA, OGG, MIDI, M4A, AMR

- Battery: 3,150 mAh

- Dimensions: 74.7x149.9x7.6 mm (WxHxD)

- Weight: 149g