Meizu MX4 review: Alternadroid

Good telephony

At its core, the phonebook on the Meizu MX4 is a list of all contacts but you can view only a specific group or filter where contracts come from - phone contacts, email account or a Meizu account.

You can't add Facebook or Twitter or any social network out of the box. Installing the Facebook or Twitter app will allow you to sync your contacts from there. You can link contacts, but the functionality is annoyingly limited.

The phonebook will automatically link contacts with the same name, but that's it. You can't manually link or unlink contacts.

Phonebook

The Meizu MX4 handled calls easily and holding on to signal wasn't an issue. Callers came out loud and clear and they didn't report any issues from our end.

The dialer features smart dialing this time, which is nice. Otherwise it doesn't differ from any other in functionality - you get the caller image and the usual controls - speaker, mute, bring up keyboard and end a call, naturally.

Dialer

The Meizu MX4 passed our loudspeaker test with flying colors. It tied the Sonim XP1 as the loudest smartphone we've tested ever and beat the OnePlus One by some decibels.

Clean messenger

The messaging department is quite straightforward: there are no folders here, just New message, Search and Settings buttons. Above is a list of all your messages organized into threads.

When composing a message, the input field starts out at only one line tall, but will grow to up to seven lines if need be. Left of the text box is a button that handles attachments and smileys.

Messenger

When you add multimedia content to the message, it is automatically turned into an MMS. You can either quickly add a smile, a photo or an audio file to go with the text or compose an MMS using all the available features (like multiple slides, slide timing, layout, etc.). The multiple slides are all shown inside the compose box.

Batch operations are enabled for multiple threads - Mark as spam and Delete are available.

Meizu have tweaked the generic email client. It supports multiple Exchange, POP or IMAP inboxes and you have access to the original folders that are created online, side by side with the standard local ones such as inbox, drafts and sent items.

Switching between accounts is pretty easy. Just swipe out the side-placed menu and you get all your folders plus your accounts.

There's support for batch operations - Mark, Filter and Delete are the available options. Filter acts against spam to weed out unwanted email addresses. There's also the option to switch to threaded view in which case an icon appears alongside the name of each thread, giving you the number of messages inside.

Email

Email and text input

The keyboard of the Meizu MX4 is nicely laid out and has a four-row interface. There's a dedicated numeric view with a numpad-like style but we would have preferred the numbers as a line on top of the keyboard.

Keyboard

You can switch between keyboard styles, send Meizu and text smileys and have an option to choose between many languages.

Keyboard

Naturally you can always download a third party keyboard if you wish, there are many on the Google Play store.