Meizu MX5 review: Amaze U

A simple yet powerful gallery

The Flyme gallery has two viewing modes - photo and gallery. The photo stacks images into months while the gallery puts them into folders. You can add or remove folders from the gallery and also search through it.

Gallery

Viewing an image feels a lot like the iOS gallery. By default the bars around an image are white with the content controls but upon a tap they turn black and lose all controls so you can focus on the image at hand.

There's also a built-in editor that offers filters and all the basic controls for contrast, brightness and you can even add blur or vignette. You cannot use different editors from the stock gallery and would need to install a third-party gallery (like Google's Photos) to have different editors.

Editing

Great music player

The music player can only find tracks located in the Music 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.

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.

The music app supports Dirac HD Audio, which improves the sound output based on the specific headphone set you are using. There is also a standard music equalizer.

Dirac HD settings • Equalizers

Capable video player

The Meizu MX5 comes with a dedicated Video app, but it expects videos to be placed in the video folder. You can use the file browser or gallery 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.

There's a pop-out option that allows you to view the video as an overlay to the OS.

Video player • Pop-out view

The Meizu MX5 played everything we threw at it - Xvid, DivX, MP4, MOV, WMV and it supports the AC3 audio codec, too. Subtitles are supported, but it recognizes only Latin and Chinese characters.

Audio quality is downright impressive

The Meizu MX5 impressed us in the first part of our audio quality test. When paired with an active external amplifier the smartphone produced perfectly clean output at volume levels higher than any other smartphone currently on the market.

The extremely high volume was here to stay even after we plugged in a pair of headphones. The only degradation we noticed in the second part of the test was an increase in stereo crosstalk that sent it from excellent to average levels. Still, we’d say it’s a very impressive showing by the Meizu flagship here.

Anyway, here go the results so you can do your comparisons.

Meizu MX5 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.