Meizu m1 metal review: Glitter in the dark

The MX browser

The web browser interface utilizes almost the entire screen real estate to the web page, save for the status bar on top and a tiny bar on the bottom for Refresh, Tabs and Bookmarks. Choosing Tabs opens a quick pop up preview of your open tabs instead of bringing up an entirely new screen, which is great as it still leaves the website your on in plain view.

The browser supports double tap and pinch zooming. It's really fast and fluid too. There are also goodies like text reflow or sharing an URL over email or SMS.

MX Browser

There's even a Reading mode and our favorite Night mode, which inverts the background and text colors and makes it really easy to read at night.

Other apps

The Meizu m1 metal features a calendar that supports multiple online accounts. It offers monthly, weekly, daily and agenda views and is pretty straightforward to work with. Creating a new event lets you set which calendar to store it in, along with a reminder.

The Calendar has a very minimal, clean look but retains all the functionality you'd expect. You can also go for the Google Calendar - it's available for download as a separate app from the Play Store.

Calendar

Moving on, we have the Clock app that will handle multiple alarms with custom repeat times, ringtones, snooze time and labels. There are also a stopwatch and timer integrated within the Clock app.

Clock

A calculator app is also on board. Interestingly you can use it as am pop-up app over the homescreen and other apps, such as MX browser. It offers a currency, length, weight and volume converter, too.

Calculator

There is a very helpful Toolbox app, which provides a flashlight, a mirror, compass, level, ruler and magnifying functions.

Toolbox

The Memos app is clean and simple. You can add notes, images and even check lists into it. The Painter app will let you paint with a number of virtual tools, choosing different colors.

Memos • Painter

The App Center works with only Chinese content but you can still use it, if you can read Chinese, that is. Thankfully, the Google Play store came preinstalled on our device so we got our apps from there.

The preinstalled file manager lets you browse through the memory of the Meizu m1 metal or through Recent, or through different media types - music, videos, pictures, etc. It allows copy, cut and paste and also sharing of files on your device.

App center • File manager

Perhaps the highlight of Meizu's homebrewed apps is the Security app. It lets you scan for viruses, clean junk files, keep an eye on your large files, manage your data traffic, and most importantly - control the permissions for each app you install.

Security app

Finally, there is a News app, which aggregates stories from sources by your choosing. It's highly customizable and is able to give you push notifications of stories as they are coming.

News app