Meizu MX3 review: Eastern connection

Gallery

Meizu hasn't made many changes to the Flyme gallery. It stacks images from folders just like the regular app, but this is about where similarities end. Inside the folders, images are arranged in a rectangular grid. You can email, share (via Bluetooth, MMS) or delete multiple images by picking them one by one from the grid after you tap and hold on a photo.

When viewing a single image, a tap on the screen will display the available options. You can Share, Crop, Delete, Set Wallpaper, Rotate, Open in Image Editor and view Details.

The gallery

The Meizu MX3 came with a very good file browser preinstalled. It lets you browse the contents of the built-in memory and offers features such as copy, paste and delete for multiple files. Sharing files over Bluetooth or email is also easy as are batch operations with multiple files and folders.

File manager • Viewing photo

The file browser also handled opening and extracting ZIP files, which can come in handy.

Music player with lyrics

The music player can only find tracks located in a specific folder. You can browse your collection the traditional way or you can select to have it filtered by folders.

In the first case tracks are sorted into several playlists like All songs, Recently added, Folders and you have the option to create custom playlists. When viewing All songs you can choose between three types of sorting in a tabbed layout: song name, artist and album.

Music player

The music controls are at the bottom of the screen. Choosing an artist will show you all the albums and corresponding songs.

Artist view

The middle section with the full-size album art is side-scrollable: you can swipe to the left or right to display the current playlist or the lyrics karaoke style.

You can access the equalizer from the advanced menu. It features several presets, which you can edit manually - but you need to insert the headphones first.

Now playing screen

If the music player is working you'll get music controls on the lockscreen - there're always available in the task switcher too.

The music player also has a play timer, which will turn it off automatically in 5 - 60 minutes.

Video player

The Meizu MX3 comes with a dedicated Video app, but it expects videos to be placed in a certain folder. You can use the file browser to get videos to play from elsewhere - it offers thumbnails and everything so we ended up using it more often than the Video app itself.

Once you get into the player, things really start to look up. The player handled all the DivX, XviD and H.264 files we threw at it trouble-free (in .AVI, .MKV and .MP4 containers) and resolution didn't matter either - 1080p videos played without a hitch. The audio codecs weren't a problem either.

Video player

Enjoying videos on the big 5.1" FullHD display is a pleasure. The now playing interface offers a scrubber and play controls - pause, forward and rewind. You can choose to watch the same video continuously.

Now playing

While watching a video you can select to see a thumbnail grid of all your videos and switch.

Choosing videos to play

Impressive audio output

The Meizu MX3 brough a hell of a nice surprise when we subjected it to our audio quality test. The smartphone delivered some of the finest output we have seen, and with no EU-mandated volume limitations to worry about, also garnished it with volume levels far above anything else in the market (yes, including the HTC One lineup).

The no-headphones test brought excellent scores all over the field and no weak points whatsoever.

The second trial went almost as well, with the above average increase in stereo crosstalk the only thing not imrpessive about the MX3 performance. This is certainly a smartphones the audiophoiles should watch out for.

Check out the numbers and see for yourselves.

Meizu MX3 frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.