Just in: Meizu M5 Note hands-on

Twas the night before New Year’s Eve when the good guy postman came in our office with hefty package in his hands. Almost like Santa he brought us a few gifts for being good kids throughout the year.

We unpacked it and there it was - Meizu M5 Note in all its pearl white beauty on the front and the silver metal cover on the back.

The m5 Note Looking cool with its metallic body and 2.5D front glass, we mostly appreciated the looks of the silver back.

M5 Note is the bigger and more powerful brother of Meizu M5 but with its 5.5” display (while the latter is 5.2”) the size is not really a wow factor while comparing devices. It is easy to handle mostly because the metallic body we already told you about. But enough about the looks. Let’s see what is going on under the hood.

The 5.5” display is IPS LCD with FullHD resolution. The device runs on MediaTek’s octa-core Helio P10 which was also the CPU in one of M5 Note’s predecessors – the Meizu M3 Note.

The OS is Flyme 5.2 based on Android Marshmallow 6.0. The good thing about such custom ROMs is that half of the Google applications that you don’t use with your regular Android are already gone. Sadly, along with them you also can’t find Google Maps or Google Play but they are easily reachable via Flyme’s own app store Hot Apps. All the apps are located on the home screen since there is no app drawer option.

As customary for Meizu phone, the home key is not only a button you can press, but it also acts as a touchpad and has an embedded fingerprint scanner. Unfortunately, we are underwhelmed by the accuracy of the fingerprint sensor. To improve accuracy we had to resort to an old trick - where we registered one and the same finger as two separate entries. This way, we hardly got any misreadings.

The fingerprint sensor in question is not always on and touching it won't wake the phone from sleep. To wake up the phone and unlock it - you need to press the physical Home button and keep your finger on it for an extra second or so in order for it to it recognize your thumbprint.

The shiny silver back sports a 13 MP camera with dual-LED flash. Video recording tops out at 1080p.

The 4000 mAh battery sounds plentiful and we can’t wait to put the phone through our battery life tests as the Mediatek chipset used is not exactly known for its power efficiency.

Our unit comes with 16 GB internal memory (4 of them reserved for the OS) with 3GB RAM but there is a microSD slot which doubles as a slot for second SIM. There’s also more powerful model with 4GB RAM and 64 GB.

Meizu’s approach has always been centered on providing value and high build quality at a lower price point. We’re yet to see if the m5 note lives up to this but seeing the price tag of around USD $150, we have our hopes high. Stay tuned as we work on our review.