After launching the flagship device MX5 and budget the Meizu M2 Note, the company announced the affordable Meizu m2 in India. Meizu m2 comes with a 5-inch HD display (1280 x 720p) and there is GFF full lamination technology which minimizes reflection and improves display quality. The phone is powered by a 1.3Ghz Mediatek 64-bit MT6735 Quad-core processor and Mali-T720 GPU.
Meizu m2 is made from a polycarbonate unibody, which makes it uniform and light. Meizu m2 competes with Xiaomi’s Redmi 2 Prime and Yu Yuphoria in the price segment. So is the Meizu m2 value for money? Read our review to find out.
Design and Build:
Design wise, the Meizu m2 has a lot of resemblance with the M1 Note launched back in May 2015 in India. The phone comes with curved rear panels and matte finishing along with the single navigational button. The power and volume keys are placed on the right side. Top houses the 3.5mm audio jack, while the micro USB charging slot along with speaker and microphone are located at the bottom.
The rear panel has the 13MP camera along with LED flash and the Meizu logo at the bottom. The device is made from a polycarbonate unibody, which makes it uniform and light and feels really good in hands and has great build quality.
The slim bezels around the display make the device compact. The front panel has the 5MP camera on the top and the home button at the bottom. But unlike the touch button on M1 Note, the m2 offers a physical button. Overall, we liked the design and build quality of m2 and it offers a standout design in the budget segment. It is probably the best-looking budget phone out there.
Display:
The Meizu M2 comes with 5 inch HD display (1280 X 720p) and the quality of the display is pretty good. Colors look very good and the touch response is also great. At no point of time, we felt the display a dull one. The brightness levels are adequate, but at times when you are out in bright sunlight you might find the brightness levels a bit low.
Overall, for the price point, Meizu m2 offers a great display.
Software:
The Meizu m2 runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop and has a custom Flyme OS 4.5 on top of it. Flyme is the custom UI from the company and it is available on all Meizu phones. The UI has a completely different look and feel and doesn’t even have any similarities with Android. If you are using Flyme OS for the first time, it is a confusing experience.
You have multiple home screen similar to MIUI and there is also a custom notification center with quick toggles. You can customize the toggles and rearrange them.
Going to the settings you see a completely different design which has a two-panel interface with the options listed on the left side and the corresponding settings located on the right panel. You can minimize or maximize the left settings panel. So if you were using stock Android, it does take some time getting used to the interface. The phone comes with only a limited number of Google apps and it includes Play store, so you can always download apps.
The interface does look polished and there is no lag when using it, but the amount of customizations and features included are limited and does not match up with MIUI or EMUI 3.0. There is also a customize app to download themes, but the language is limited to Chinese. The phone also comes preloaded with apps like security, recorder, calculator. The security app is handy tool to clean up the phone.
The phone also comes with Easy mode with bigger icons for elderly people.
Performance:
Meizu M2 is powered by MT6735 Quad processor from MediaTek clocked at 1.3Ghz coupled with 2GB RAM. This is a 64bit processor from MediaTek and the performance is very good. We seldom saw any lags with normal usage and the phone responded well for the tasks it was put to. Even when running multiple apps (tested upto 15 apps) in the background, there was hardly any issue with performance.
The gaming experience of the device was fairly good with most of the games performing very well with hardly any lag or issues. The device did not heat up while gaming and the maximum temperature during gaming was very less compared to most other smartphones.
The phone comes with 16GB internal storage and there is micro SD card support but it is a hybrid SIM, which means you can either use two sim cards or one SIM card and micro SD card. Around 11GB is available to user in the first boot. The phone does support USB OTG out of the box and you can connect your pen drives.
Multi-tasking on the device is a bit tricky task and you need to swipe up from the bottom of the screen to see the running apps and close them.
The phone has a mBack button integrated into the home button. While Meizu says that this concept is extremely useful, it take a while to get used to it since we are used to pressing the home button. The call quality of the device was pretty good and the speaker output is also decent. It might not be very loud, but acceptable quality.
Camera:
While most of the budget phones are offering 8MP cameras in this price point, Meizu m2 ships with a 13MP rear camera and LED flash along with a front facing 5MP camera for selfies and video calls. The camera interface is pretty simple and easy to use with almost all controls easily accessible. The camera interface offers lots of modes like manual, slow motion, beauty, panorama and light field.
You also get a handful of filters to apply to the photos. The phone takes photos in 4:3 aspect ratio. The photos taken with the device was pretty good overall with good colors and decent clarity for a budget phone. Meizu has been known for devices with great cameras and the m2 also maintains it. The daylight shots have good details and the colors look natural, but at times if the light changes, the quality of photo also does change.
Meizu m2 can record videos in 1080p and the video quality is decent. Here are some of the samples taken with the device.
Battery Life:
The phone comes with a 2500mah battery and the battery performance is decent. With moderate usage, you can easily get a day of battery life with average screen on time of 3 to 3.5 hours. The phone also comes with power saving and performance modes along with the balanced modes. Overall, for a budget phone, the battery performance was acceptable.
Verdict:
Meizu M2 faces stiff competition from the likes of Xiaomi Redmi 2 Prime and Yu Yuphoria, both priced at Rs 6,999. Meizu offers great design and build, good performance, camera and decent battery life. The UI is a bit confusing for beginners, but it does ship with Android 5.1. Meizu is a fairly new brand in India, although they are well established in China, so might take some time to get into the Indian market. The company also claims to have set up 40+ service centers across India.
If you are not worried about the after sales service, Meizu m2 offers great value for money.
Does it come with Radio???