Contrary to expectations, Meizu dropped ‘MX’ from the name of its latest flagship smartphone. Instead, it’s called the PRO 5 signifying its more premium features.
For a start, the Meizu Pro 5 has a 5.7-inch full HD Super AMOLED display and the same processor as the Samsung Galaxy S6 – the octa core Exynos 7420 running at a maximum of 2.1GHz!
The Meizu Pro 5 is housed in a metallic body which resembles the iPhone 6 design. Its screen has a slight curve on its edges called 2.5D arc and covered in a scratch resistant Gorilla Glass 3.
Below the display is the home button that also serves as a finger print sensor while above it is a 5.0 Megapixel camera with Fotonation 2.0 selfie enhancement.
At the back is a 21.16 Megapixel camera with laser assisted autofocus for shooting sharper pictures quickly. There’s also a two-tone LED flash for more natural-looking pictures.
| Rear camera of the Meizu Pro 5. |
Underneath its metallic shell, the Meizu Pro 5 boasts beastly specs for a smartphone. Its Exynos 7420 chipset is composed of four 2.1GHz Cortex-A57 high performance CPU cores and another power saving 1.5GHz Cortex-A53 quad core CPU.
Graphics rendering is handled by an octa core Mali-T760 GPU while there are two options for RAM and storage space – 4GB RAM + 64GB ROM or the cheaper 3GB RAM + 32GB ROM variant.
Meizu boasts the Pro 5’s use of LPDDR4 RAM technology and UFS 2.0 storage technology. These two improve the phone’s performance in recording videos and playing hard core games. In fact, the phone scores a whopping 76,000 points on Antutu Benchmark!
| The Meizu Pro 5 scores higher than the Samsung Galaxy S6! |
The Meizu Pro 5 ships with Android 5.1 Lollipop as its operating system. However, there’s a heavily customized skin on top of it – Flyme 5.0.
Some people who love the stock Android design might hate it but Meizu boasts the design and additional features of Flyme.
It offers a simplistic but ‘more professional-looking’ design with intuitive gestures and toggles.
There are two Nano SIM card slots on the Meizu Pro 5. The second one can be used as a microSD card slot and supports up to 128GB memory cards.
Just like the recently announced Xiaomi Mi 4c, it also uses a reversible USB Type-C port. The company doesn’t offer a MicroUSB 2.0 to USB Type-C adaptor though.
The phone supports 4G LTE Cat. 6 networks and can reach download speeds of up to 300Mbps! Of course, that’s not possible outside the company’s labs. It’s still considerably fast though.
The Meizu Pro 5 has High-Fidelity sound output courtesy of a several dedicated chips for audio processing including a ‘high-end’ digital audio converter (DAC) and Solo amp circuit.
A non-removable 3,050mAh Li-ion battery powers the device for up to two (2) days of continuously playing music. Playing need for speed will kill it in 9 hours while using surfing the internet using 4G LTE cuts the battery life in 7 hours.
It also supports fast charging using the company’s mCharge 2.0 technology. In merely 30 minutes, the battery can reach 65% using the included fast charger.
| The Meizu Pro 5 is available in gold, white, gray and half-tone black and white. |
Here’s why Meizu’s smartphones are very interesting: the new Meizu Pro 5 will only cost around ₱20,000 for the 3GB version while the 4GB one is around ₱22,500.
That’s considerably cheaper than buying a Samsung Galaxy S6 at almost double the price! However, availability of these phones outside China is limited.
We’ll post another article once the Meizu Pro 5 gets its official price and release date here in the Philippines.
