You’ll have noticed a number of Chinese phones pass through the doors of our Test Centre these days. Quite simply, that’s because they rival UK-sold smartphones on design and features, but come at a much lower price. The Meizu Pro 6 Plus is one of the more expensive examples to come to our attention, available from Geekbuying at £399.05 ($512.99/471.75€), but it’s also one of the most powerful. Also see: Best Chinese phones 2017
Consider that this price puts it on par with the OnePlus 3T, a highly soughtafter, incredibly powerful flagship Android phone (for now – the OnePlus 5 is due any day) that also costs £399. Now consider that in place of the OnePlus 3T’s 5.5in full-HD screen you get a 5.7in Quad-HD panel, and a design reminiscent of the iPhone 6s Plus. Performance is very good from the Exynos 8890 chip and 4GB of DDR4 RAM (that’s the same setup as in the Galaxy S7), if not as exemplary as that of the OnePlus 3T.
However, before you rush off and buy the Meizu Pro 6 Plus over the OnePlus 3T, there are a couple of other considerations you need to be aware of. First, the OnePlus 3T is sold direct from the company or via major mobile operators such as O2, which means help is easily at hand should anything go wrong. By comparison the Meizu Pro 6 Plus is sold by Geekbuying, a Chinese importer through which support will be less readily available (it’s also available direct from Meizu, but only if you live in China). Though we’ve never personally had an issue dealing with Geekbuying, you should know that your rights are different when purchasing from China than they are the UK and Europe.
Second, because you’ll be importing this phone from China you’ll legally be responsible for paying VAT duty. Of course some parcels get through Customs without a whisper of a fine, and others get around exorbitant costs by lowering the value on the shipping paperwork (your fee is calculated at 20 percent of this value plus an admin fee of around £11), but if you are asked to pay import duty you do have to do so. Naturally this will raise the overall cost of the phone, so it’s worth factoring into your budget. You can read more about the risks associated with buying Chinese tech in our article on the pros and cons of purchasing grey-market tech.
It’s also worth pointing out that the other UK-sold phone we mentioned there – last year’s category-leading Galaxy S7 – can now be bought SIM-free from Amazon for just a little over £400. And while you might choose the Meizu over the OnePlus 3T, you certainly wouldn’t the Samsung Galaxy S7.
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Meizu Pro 6 Plus design and build
Meizu has built the Pro 6 Plus to a high standard, with a metal unibody design (available in gold, as seen here, grey or silver) and a clean white fascia that will ring familiar with iPhone 6s Plus users. It’s not a carbon copy of the iPhone, with a rectangular rather than circular front-facing home button and some other little tweaks, but you can easily see the similarities, right down to the top- and bottom antenna lines and Designed by Meizu logo on the rear.
One of those tweaks can be found at the back, right about where you might expect to see an Apple logo, and it’s something that marks a first for us in phone reviews: a 10-LED flash ring that sits below a centrally located 12Mp camera. It looks and, on paper, sounds cool, but in practise isn’t any more adept at low-light photography than some dual-LED flashes we’ve tried.
The camera itself juts out of the chassis only a small amount, which pleasingly stops the handset rocking on a flat surface and also detracting from the overall design. Also see: Best Android phones 2017
A single speaker grille is found on the bottom edge of the handset, alongside a fast USB-C 3.1 port and a 3.5mm headphone jack. On the right edge you’ll find a volume rocker and power button, and on the left a pin-operated dual-SIM tray. So, everything is pretty much where you’d expect to find it.
That is until you go to actually use the phone, and that’s when you realise Meizu has implemented a horrible button setup akin to that of the iPhone. (And that’s not the only iPhone-esque change when it comes to usability, because there’s also no app tray to be found.)
Rather than finding physical or, more often these days, capacitive buttons for home, back and multitasking, the Meizu Pro 6 Plus has just one central button. It’s well done and looks good, with a gold trim and a flush design, but it’s a nightmare to get your head around.
Your press it once to go back, or press and hold to go home. To access multitasking you swipe up from the bottom edge of the screen either side of the home button – something we found out entirely by accident.
Also integrated to this home button is a fast and responsive mTouch fingerprint scanner, which admittedly works very well.
For a device with a large 5.7in screen the Meizu is very comfortable to hold in a single hand, and it’s not overly heavy at just 158g. This ergonomic design is achieved through a slim 7.3mm chassis that is slightly rounded at the edges, as well as slim screen bezels to the left and right, together reducing the distance your finger might ever need to stretch across the display.
The display itself is a good one, and one of few Quad-HD panels we’ve seen in Chinese phones. This is a Super AMOLED panel, which is our favourite kind of screen tech, with punchy, vibrant colours and rich and proper blacks. Brightness and overall quality isn’t as high as you’d find on Samsung’s Quad-HD phones, but it’s certainly difficult to fault.
That said, Meizu doesn’t specify whether any protective glass is in use here, and being a Chinese phone you will likely find it more difficult to source a protective case. Also see: Best mid-range phones 2017
Another similarity with Samsung phones is the implementation of an Always-on display. When activated (it’s off by default), you’ll be able to see at a glance what is the time, date and remaining battery capacity simply by looking at the screen. The feature uses a tiny amount of battery power, and should actually reduce the amount of power you use overall as you aren’t constantly waking the screen to check the time.
Of course, battery life isn’t really something you need to worry about with the Pro 6 Plus, since its 3,400mAh battery should easily last you two days of use. It doesn’t support wireless charging like Samsung’s rival, but it does seemingly just keep on going. (And you can always use a power bank if you need more.)
One thing we’d like to see in the Meizu Pro 6 Plus’ follow-up is waterproofing protection, which is beginning to make its way on to the UK smartphone market but less so in China.
Meizu Pro 6 Plus core hardware and performance
We mentioned earlier that the Meizu Pro 6 Plus has the same core hardware setup as the Galaxy S7, and that really is impressive for a phone at this price point – so far it’s something only OnePlus has managed to achieve in the UK mainstream mobile phone market. Also see: What’s the fastest phone?
Its performance in our benchmarks was lower than both those phones, yet still evident of an extremely capable device. We found operation smooth and fluid. It’s worth pointing out that benchmark scores can fluctuate from one minute to the next, and that they can be easily gamed (pointing no fingers here). Plus the OnePlus 3T benefits from an extra couple of gigs of RAM.
Leading the show here is one of Samsung’s own Exynos 8890 processors, an octa-core chip with four Cortex-A53 cores running at 2GHz and four at 1.6GHz. You should note that if you buy the 128GB storage model (our review model came with 64GB of fast UFS 2.0 storage, but no possibility of expansion through microSD) these cores are clocked higher at 2.3- and 1.6GHz respectively.
Integrated to this processor is the ARM Mali-T880 MP10 GPU (MP12 in the 128GB model), which is paired with 4GB of LPDDR4 memory.
You can see the results of our benchmarks in comparison to the Galaxy S7 and OnePlus 3T in the graph below.
Meizu Pro 6 Plus review continues on the next page >>
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