Meizu m1 note review: A major scale

Clean gallery

The Flyme gallery has two viewing modes - photo and gallery. The photo stacks images into months while the gallery puts them into folders. You can add or remove folders from the gallery and also search through it.

Gallery

Viewing an image feels a lot like the iOS gallery. By default the bars around an image are white with the content controls but upon a tap they turn black and lose all controls so you can focus on the image at hand.

There's also a built-in editor that offers filters and all the basic controls for contrast, brightness and you can even add blur or vignette. You cannot use different editors from the stock gallery and would need to install a third-party gallery (like Google's Photos) to have different editors.

Editing

Music player supports Dirac HD

The music player can only find tracks located in the music folder. You can browse your collection the traditional way or you can select to have it filtered by folders.

In the first case tracks are sorted into several playlists like All songs, Recently added, Folders and you have the option to create custom playlists. When viewing All songs you can choose between three types of sorting in a tabbed layout: song name, artist and album.

Music player

The music controls are at the bottom of the screen. Choosing an artist will show you all the albums and corresponding songs.

Now playing

You can access the equalizer from the advanced menu. It features several presets, which you can edit manually - but you need to insert the headphones first.

The music app supports Dirac HD Audio, which improves the hardware fidelity and it can be enabled to work with specific headphones. There is also a standard music equalizer.

Dirac HD settings • Equalizers

Capable video player

The Meizu m1 note comes with a dedicated Video app, but it expects videos to be placed in the video folder. You can use the file browser or gallery to get videos to play from elsewhere - it offers thumbnails and everything so we ended up using it more often than the Video app itself.

Video player

There's a pop-out option that allows you to view the video as an overlay to the OS. It's quite limited compared to Samsung and LG's modes for pop up play as you don't get any resizing or opacity controls - just play controls and the option to move the video around the screen.

Pop-out view

The Meizu m1 note played everything we threw at it - Xvid, DivX, MP4, MOV, WMV and it supports the AC3 audio codec, too. Subtitles are supported, but our unit had some issue with the encoding - regardless of the subtitles language, we always got Chinese characters.

Overall movies played without issues up to 1080p resolution on the m1 note.

Audio quality is excellently clean, headphones volume low

When connected to an active external amplifier the Meizu m1 note delivers an excellent performance - matching greatly clean output with just above average volume levels.

Plug in a pair of headphones, however, and volume levels drop to below average, preventing the m1 from getting a perfect score here. On the positive side the output is still nicely clean with a very minor bump in the stereo crosstalk the only notable change there. A solid performance for the entry-level handset here.

And here go the detailed results so you can check them out for yourselves.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Meizu m1 note	+0.02, -0.11	-86.9	88.0	0.0054	0.012	-86.0
Meizu m1 note (headphones attached)	+0.01, -0.16	-89.1	91.4	0.0037	0.037	-71.1
Xiaomi Redmi 2	+0.06, -0.04	-94.8	95.9	0.026	0.016	-95.8
Xiaomi Redmi 2 (headphones attached)	+0.04, -0.06	-94.0	91.0	0.039	0.053	-70.0
Xiaomi Redmi 1S	+0.08, -0.02	-95.4	88.4	0.0045	0.028	-82.3
Xiaomi Redmi 1S (headphones attached)	+0.03, -0.07	-95.3	88.2	0.0090	0.032	-52.8
Xiaomi Redmi Note	+0.09, -1.23	-88.4	88.4	0.056	0.252	-85.2
Xiaomi Redmi Note (headphones attached)	+0.83, -6.73	-84.0	86.7	0.196	2.354	-63.5
Oppo R819	+0.04, -0.09	-92.4	92.3	0.017	0.045	-87.9
Oppo R819 (headphones attached)	+0.58, -0.13	-91.0	90.9	0.015	0.438	-48.7
Nokia Lumia 625	+0.13, -0.10	-90.3	90.3	0.013	0.355	-82.5
Nokia Lumia 625 (headphones attached)	+0.24, -0.00	-90.2	90.2	0.014	0.460	-83.8

Meizu m1 note frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.