Meizu M6 Review - Worth a look?

Meizu M6 is a budget smartphone packed with features that can be found on some pricier devices. 

Meizu M6

Meizu has been in the consumer electronics industry since 2003 starting out with MP3 players and MP4 players as well.

In case you missed it, the Meizu M6 is the company's current entry-level smartphone packed with a close to premium looking metal clad build. It is equipped with MT6750 octa-core chip, 3,070mAh battery, 13MP PDAF main camera, 8MP selfie shooter, 4G LTE w/ VoLTE, and Nougat based FlyMe OS 6.0.

But is it worth a look? Let's find out in this full review! 

Disclaimer: We were loaned with the 2GB RAM and 16GB internal storage variant for our honest review. This can be a slightly less speedy than the 3GB RAM/32GB ROM variant.

For our review part 1: Meizu M6 Unboxing and First Impressions

Display Quality

Meizu M6 5.2-inch display

Meizu M6 features a 5.2-inch 2.5D curved IPS screen w/ HD 1280 x 720 resolution at 282 ppi. It is decent enough to read outdoors under direct sunlight at around 50 percent brightness.

At 282 ppi, the pixels are definitely visible on the screen when your eyes are close enough although it doesn't affect actual usage in any negative way other than the mentioned pixelation.

Speaking of pixelation, this phone is definitely not for VR consumption such as games as even 1080p panels already end up looking close to 800 x 600 (or it will be reminiscent of it for anyone that was gaming on this resolution in the 90s).

The advantage would come in the form of battery savings due to its use of fewer pixels than other high-resolution competitors. Also, it did not stop me from enjoying the movie test.

It has at least 5 points of touch.

Audio Quality

M6 has a single speaker located on its bottom. It has 2 grilles but only one has a speaker. It also has the traditional 3.5 mm headphone jack.

The sound coming from the single speaker is audible enough but it would certainly help if you do the 'cupping' technique and aim it towards you.

I listened to soundtracks from the movie "The Greatest Showman" for this review. Using "The Greatest Show" and "Rewrite the Stars" to test the speaker. I can say that the best use case for the phone speaker should you not have earphones or standalone speakers for any reason is for listening to a ca Pella or acoustic tracks with an emphasis on the highs and secondly on the mids.

The mono speaker just could not give the tracks justice most especially on the bassy parts although Keala Settle’s mini solo on the first track is clearly audible.

Call quality is decent. The person on the other side could pick-up background noise (a normal fan set to maximum and a YouTube video playing on laptop speakers within 3 to 4 feet of the phone's mic) although it was nothing obtrusive. I can hear the other party clearly as well.

Voice recordings are decent too.

Battery Life

Stellar battery!

Meizu M6 is equipped with 3000mAh of battery. It lasted for a total of 11 hours and 6 minutes on our battery benchmark. 

The phone does not have quick charging. It took around 2 hours and 30 minutes from 0 for a full charge.

I tried to watch a movie on the phone (for the science of course) to test consumption during use. I chose New Police Story which is a Jackie Chan film on the phone’s native resolution. This was done at maximum volume without headphones and brightness and while connected to WiFi.

From a full charge, the phone dropped to 82 percent by the time I finished the usual Jackie Chan bloopers at the end of the movie. Therefore, you can definitely watch two movies on the go or maybe stretch that to three if you’re conservative with your use.

Camera

Meizu M6

The Meizu M6 has a 13MP f/2.2 camera w/ PDAF focus and dual tone LED flash at the back. It also has a pro mode with adjustment for shutter speed and more.

For casual shooters who likes uploading on social media most of the time, a lot of mid-range phones and even those at the entry-level price bracket can shoot acceptable daylight shoots with their front and rear-facing cameras. The same can be said for this phone.

The real battle these days are with lowlight shots. The Meizu M6's 13MP rear camera has Pro mode available for better lowlight shots.

Rear Camera Samples

Daylight

Daylight 2

Close-up

Lowlight

The 8MP front camera has beautification on by default which you can adjust through a slider.

8MP 

An edit option is also available where you can apply filters or camera effects like artificial bokeh. The filters can be useful if you over beautified and ended up with a "fake" looking picture.

Selfie Camera Samples

Daylight selfie

Daylight selfie 2

Indoor selfie

Lowlight selfie

See also: Meizu M6: First Camera Samples

For video, the phone is capable of shooting 1080p at 30 fps. It has a plethora of modes available including time-lapse and slow-motion video although in all honesty, unless you have a "creative" application for pixelated slow-mo in any of your projects, it is unusable.

The microphone recording quality would suggest that you're better of buying an additional directional microphone if you're planning to use it on loud places such as concerts.

Performance

Geekbench score

With a MT6750 octa-core processor and a Mali-T860 MP2 SoC combo, what we have here is a mid-range contender originally announced in 2016 by Mediatek and has been for use in a wide range of different phones since around Q2 2017.

The chip is capable of running current popular and new Android games (even PUBG mobile although it’s not the smoothest experience). It is manufactured in 28 nm process so power efficiency is not on par with more modern 14 or 16 nm chips.

For some reason, however, AnTuTu had a problem with executing its benchmark in its entirety which means it’s always not proceeding after the GPU test although the app itself does not crash and is still operable. Searching for previous versions of the said software did not produce any desirable results either.

The games were on medium settings by default except for PUBG mobile which is was set to low. Other games such as Mortal Kombat X simply denied to run on this phone.

Meizu's custom UI needs its own mini-part in this review due to its inherent features. This phone is also running on Android 7.0 Nougat.

Much like Samsung's old TouchWiz UI, Meizu also has their own Flyme OS. The phone may look similar to competitors at the price range but Meizu has a couple of gestures that potential buyers may need to get used to as most of their phones would probably have it available at factory.

The phone has one physical button that serves as the home button but unlike other android phones, there are no capacitive buttons flanking both sides.

The "back" feature, then, can be activated by tapping the home button (not pressing it) which is very convenient for one-hand use most of the time. The phone, as mentioned, is also on the lighter side. 

Accessing the multi-task bar will require the user to swipe up coming from the bottom of the screen.

Features aside, an advice I would give to potential customers would be to immediately download the Google suite of apps. Meizu has its own app store in lieu of the missing Play Store but then, when you try to play any games or open any apps that require you to be connected to Google Play or your Google account, you would end up having to download all of them anyway. 

Meizu's own market itself isn't bad (except for the fact that the app stopped downloading when the phone was set to sleep mode by default) but you are not maximizing your comforts without doing the mentioned step.

Some oddities that I experienced, which may be limited to our review sample, is it keeps on sending an email regarding an error every time the phone boots. Also, when I linked the phone to my gmail, it keeps getting recognized as a "Gionee M6". As mentioned in the disclaimer, these may not be an issue on the retail device released on the market.

The rest of the telephony and connectivity experience is good.

Pros - Nice design, decent performance, nice cameras, stellar battery, affordable price tag

Cons - Not good speakers, slow charging, not working slow-mo video

Verdict

With the presented information above for this phone, we think that for its projected price point, the phone performs solid enough through daily tasks and even a bit of gaming on the side.

However, to those that want to follow the current smartphone trends such as the 18:9 aspect ratio at a certain price point, the potential customer for this phone might have it overlooked for other available offerings.

At Shopee, the Meizu M6 2GB RAM variant is priced at just PHP 4,490!

Build/Design - 3.5
Display - 3.75 
Audio - 3.5 
Battery - 4
Camera - 4
Performance - 4
Average - 3.7/5