Xiaomi may be the largest Chinese smartphone manufacturer, but that doesn’t mean we should discount the competition. As it happens, we here at Android Headlines don’t do that and this article today is about Meizu, where at a recent tech event, vice president Li Nan took time to talk about future plans and how the business considers itself. You see, many of China’s smartphone manufacturers can be and have been accused of copying Apple. Li embraced this, saying that Meizu’s entire team is learning from Apple and how their products follow Apple’s example. He even went as far to say that he believes Meizu sits between Xiaomi and Apple in the smartphone ranking leagues. This is a bold claim to make, but then we should consider the Meizu MX4 in this context. And yes, it does look a little derived from the iPhone – but is this a bad thing?
You see, the Meizu MX4’s specification list leads like Meizu took each desired feature from the current crop of developed flagship devices and combined them into the one unit, with a distinctive Chinese flavour. The processor is a MediaTek octa-core, consisting of a quad core 1.7 GHz ARM-Cortex A17 processor unit for the heavy lifting combined with a 2.2 GHz quad core ARM-Cortex A7 processor that’s designed to sip battery. All eight cores can operate simultaneously if necessary. The device uses a 5.4-inch display of 1,920 by 1,152 pixel resolution. The MX4 comes with high speed WiFi, 4G LTE and a 3,100 mAh battery. Around the back, there’s a 20.7 MP Sony camera, which features a 0.3 second focus speed and can capture 25-photographs per second. This impressive hardware is wrapped into a magnesium alloy chassis and weighs less than 150g. It runs Android Kit Kat under the Flyme 4 interface. These are genuinely high end specifications and the handset is under $500!
When asked if Meizu will follow Xiaomi’s lead to invest away from mobile ‘phones and into smartdevices and other products, Li said that Meizu “wouldn’t rule it out… compared to Xiaomi, Meizu is more focused, and there is still a lot of space to explore with respect to smartphones.” That sounds like the business will be concentrating on smartphones for the foreseeable future. And given the excellent looking MX4 and the up and coming MX4 Pro, which promises to pack even higher end features and specification into a similar sized device, this doesn’t seem like a bad idea.