Meizu M6s hands-on, first impressions

The Meizu M6s is scheduled to be released in the Philippines in the next few weeks. The Meizu M6s takes off from the original Meizu M6 last September 2017 but with some pretty significant upgrades.

The M6s is the first in the Meizu line-up 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.

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 their flagship Xperia devices.

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%.

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. Based on our initial benchmarks, the Exynos 7872 produces pretty good scores with an Antutu benchmark of 89,465 points.

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.

The M6s comes with a 3,000mAh Li-ion battery that supports fast charging (more on this in our battery life test) although we’re a bit disappointed with the use of a microUSB port instead of a Type-C port.

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.

Here are some sample photos:

For its price point, the Meizu M6s looks pretty promising but we’ll have to test it out and give you our verdict in our full review.

Meizu M6s specs:
5.7-inch HD+ 1440 x 720, 18:9, In-Cell display, 282ppi
Exynos 7872 hexa-core chip
2 x ARM Cortex A73 2.0GHz + 4 x ARM Cortex A53 1.6 GHz
Mali-G71 GPU
3GB LPDDR3 RAM
32GB/64GB storage
microSD up to 128GB (SIM 2 slot)
16MP f/2.0 PDAF rear camera, dual-tone flash
8MP f/2.0 front camera
Dual-SIM
4G LTE
Bluetooth 4.2, BLE
WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n
GPS, A-GPS
Gyroscope
Fingerprint scanner
3,000mAh Li-Ion battery
Android 7.0 Nougat with Flyme UI 6.2
152 x 72.5 x 8 mm (dimensions)
160 grams (weight)

The global MSRP is about 150 euros which is about Php9,400USD 160INR 13,579EUR 153CNY 1,167 when converted directly but we could see a Philippine price a bit lower than this.