Pan Jiutang is a well-known China-based analyst, and he claims that Meizu will not introduce a Snapdragon-based flagship in 2017, despite the fact rumors have been claiming otherwise. Mr. Jiutang did say that Meizu will use a mid-range Snapdragon SoC in at least one of their smartphones this year, the Snapdragon 626, but that a flagship smartphone fueled by a Snapdragon SoC will not see the light of day before the end of this year.
Now, Meizu’s VP, Li Nan, did talk about this a while back, though he did not mention anything about a flagship smartphone powered by a Snapdragon SoC. After one of the company’s fans asked him about Snapdragon processors, he did confirm that a Snapdragon-powered smartphone is coming later this year, but he did not give any other info, so it is possible that we’ll see a mid-range smartphone powered by one of Qualcomm’s processors, and it seems like that SoC will be the Snapdragon 626, as Mr. Jiutang mentioned. Meizu’s product schedule did leak a while back, and the Snapdragon 626 was listed there, but the Snapdragon 835 was not. Now, as some of you probably already know, Meizu is used to including MediaTek SoCs in their smartphones, while the company also released a couple of Exynos-powered handsets. Exynos-powered smartphones are usually the company’s flagship offerings, like the Meizu PRO 6 Plus which the company introduced last year, a smartphone which is fueled by the Exynos 8890, which was the company’s flagship for 2016, and it is still one of the most powerful SoCs out there.
Now, if Meizu plans to introduce a Snapdragon-powered flagship, and Mr. Jiutang is wrong, then we’ll see such a phone launched at the end of this year, while a mid-range handset fueled by the Snapdragon 626 could arrive sooner than that, but probably not before Q3 or Q4. That’s more or less it, all we can do at this point is wait for more info from Meizu, but before we see their Snapdragon-powered handset, we’ll probably get to see their all-new flagship which is expected to launch next month, and it will probably be fueled by the Helio X30, but nothing has been confirmed just yet.