Hands-on with the Meizu M6s

Meizu isn’t a well-known smartphone brand in the Philippines but once in a while they would release an interesting device at a very affordable price point. One such device is the Meizu M6s.

The M6s is the first in the Meizu lineup to sport an 18:9 screen aspect ratio. This gives the M6s a larger 5.7-inch display compared to the 5.2-inch of M6 but on the same body size.

The M6s sports the same familiar look in an all-metal unibody design. What’s kind of unique to the Meizu M6s is the dedicated fingerprint scanner that is placed on the right side of the device, much like how Sony does it with its flagship Xperia devices.

The power button is on the right, volume controls on the left along with the SIM card slot. The speakers are at the bottom together with the 3.5mm audio port and the microUSB charging port.

The display only has an HD+ resolution or 1440 x 720 pixels but that’s enough to give the device pretty good coverage. The IPS panel is good, bright and crisp. The top and bottom bezels are narrower with a screen-to-body ratio of a little over 76 per cent.

Powering the Meizu M6s is a new chipset launched by Samsung last month, the Exynos 7872. This is the first mobile device to actually use the new chipset which uses the 14nm process. The Exynos 7872 has a hexa-core processor with two very powerful ARM Cortex A73 running at a max clock speed of 2.0GHz. The other quad-core processors are the more power-efficient A53 running at 1.6GHz. Powering the graphics is a single-core Mali-G71 GPU with a clock speed of 1.2GHz. That should be enough for a  decent gaming experience.

Completing the core specs is 3GB of RAM with either 32GB or 64GB of storage. There’s Android 7.0 Nougat pre-installed right out of the box and heavy customization brought by Flyme UI 6.2.

For connectivity, you have 4G LTE support in the dual SIM slot, Bluetooth 4.2, WiFi, GPS and a gyroscope.

The M6s comes with a 3,000mAh Lithium-Ion battery that supports fast charging although we’re a bit disappointed with the use of a micro-USB port instead of a Type-C port. The chip is very power-efficient and our initial PC Mark Battery test yielded 11 hours and 31 minutes, which is pretty good.

The rear camera of the M6s is a lone 16-megapixel with f/2.0 aperture, phase-detection auto-focus and a dual-tone LED flash. It takes decent photos under good or well-lit conditions but we find the auto-focus a bit sluggish at times. The front-facing camera has an 8MP sensor with f/2.2 aperture.

Though not yet released in the Philippines, we expect the Meizu M6s to be priced a little under P10,000. That makes it a competitive alternative to some of the already mainstream budget smartphones in the market today.