Meizu MX6 review: Six of a kind

Telephony

At its core, the phonebook on the Meizu MX6 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.

The dialer features smart dialing, which is nice. Otherwise it doesn't differ from any other in functionality.

The dialer • Phonebook • A contact

The Meizu MX6 has all reception bars full and held onto signal great even in tighter spots. Call quality is very good. A dedicated mic for active noise cancellation makes sure the other party hears you loud and clear.

The phone supports dual-SIM with dual-standby. The second SIM (you choose which card to be secondary) supports 3G and GSM networks, while the primary works on 3G and LTE. Managing the SIM cards is very easy as is initiating calls and sending texts.

The Meizu MX6 scored a Good mark at our loudspeaker test. The speaker's audio quality is about the average for a single-speaker setup with crisp but not so deep sound.

The 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 • Albums • Viewing an image • Editing an image

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.

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.

The homepage • Music player • Browsing albums • Now playing • Equalizers

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.

Great video player

The Meizu MX6 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

The Meizu MX6 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 output is amazingly loud

The Meizu MX6 is easily among the best devices we’ve tested when hooked up to an active external amplifier. The flagship posted excellent scores and garnished them with some of the loudest output we’ve ever seen.

Impressively enough the volume remained as high when we plugged in our standard headphones set. Unfortunately clairty took a pretty sharp turn for the worse with stereo quality deteriorating significantly and some distortion creeping in. A rather mediocre showing in that aspect, but many will feel the loudness is worth the compromise.

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

Meizu MX6 frequency response

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