Meizu MX review: Amaze U

Expansive connectivity

The Meizu MX does very well when it comes to travelling - it does quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE along with penta-band 3G with blazing fast HDPA+ - the downlink reaches up to 21.6Mbps.

Locally, you get Wi-Fi b/g/n with WPS for easy and secure connections to new Wi-Fi routers. The Meizu MX uses Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, which is getting old but still gets the job done.

The Wi-Fi reception on the Meizu MX is very weak. It's not a death-grip issue, but if you move away from the router with some moderate obstacles in the way, the signal drops to the bottom threshold. It works most of the time, but it cuts out too. Other phones have little issues working in the same area. 2G/3G reception wasn't an issue.

The microUSB port is quite interesting - it supports mass storage connections with a computer as you would expect, but also does USB host for hooking things to the phone, MHL for HD TV-Out and also S/PDIF, which is a digital way to output multi-channel audio and will be used for the dock.

S/PDIF is supported

Redesigned web browser is great

The web browser plays a central role in the Meizu MX as evidenced by its shortcut's position - the middle shortcut in the dock at the bottom of the homescreen, which is usually where the app drawer shortcut goes (or the dialer shortcut).

The user interface of the browser has been completely redesigned and we found a couple of things we really liked about it. The back end is the same as on all Androids, so you can expect the same level of compatibility and speed you're used to.

Anyway, the browser interface dedicates almost the entire screen to the web page, save for the status bar on top. To bring out more controls, you tap the Menu key.

The controls include the standard stuff - address bar on top and several buttons at the bottom (reload, new tab, close tab, bookmarks and more). Above those controls is a line of thumbnails of all the tabs. You can switch tabs or close them from here.

The browser has a very capable custom interface

It's the best tab management solution we've seen in an Android browser yet.

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.

The browser came without Flash preinstalled, but we installed it manually from the Market and it worked. 720p YouTube videos played mostly fine (with some lagging occasionally), but we expected 1080p to be smooth, like on the Galaxy S II. It seems like a software issue rather than a chipset issue. At least Flash games played without a hitch.

Watching a YouTube video • Playing a touch-optimized Flash game

Android also supports HTML5 videos, which are the future of mobile video streaming.

Hidden Office document viewer on board

If you look through the homescreens, you won't find a document viewer app but if you try to open an Office document from the file browser, one will appear. It supports .DOC, .XLS and .PPT (both Office 2003 and 2007 files) and PDFs too.

The viewer works very fast in both zooming and panning. It lacks functionality like searching inside the document though.

Viewing documents on the Meizu MX

The app can't edit files, but there's a paid upgrade that enables that option too.

Organizer has all the basics, but no extras

The Meizu MX features a calendar that supports multiple online accounts. It offers monthly, 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 multiple reminders.

The calendar

In an iOS-like twist, the icon for the calendar displays the current day of the month.

Moving on, we have the Alarm Clock app that will handle multiple alarms with custom repeat patterns, ringtones, snooze time and labels.

You can set multiple alarms with different repeat patterns

There's also a Notes app, which offers four different colors for the background of a note, which will be helpful if you want to organize them into several categories. There's a widget accompanying the Notes app, which displays the most recent notes and offers a quick shortcut for adding new ones.

The Notes app helps you stay organized with different colors • The Notes widget

The Recorder app rounds off the organizer functionality of the phone. It offers the option to record calls, which some might find useful.

Recorder app