Meizu Pro 7 Plus review: Two-Face

Telephony

By default the phonebook on the Meizu Pro 7 Plus lists all your contacts, but you can also filter by groups or source - phone contacts, email account contacts or Meizu account contacts, for instance.

The dialer features smart dialing, but only by numbers, not names, so hardly very useful.

Phonebook • The dialer • A single contact

The Meizu Pro 7 Plus had excellent in-call quality with the dedicated mic for active noise cancellation doing a good job.

The phone supports dual-SIM with dual-standby. Managing the SIM cards is very easy, as is initiating calls and sending texts.

Loudspeaker

The Meizu Pro 7 Plus scored an Excellent mark in our loudspeaker test and turned out to be one of the loudest smartphones we've had to date. The speaker sound quality was also great, and even though we would have preferred stereo speakers, we appreciated the crisp sound - even at maximum volume.

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 search through it, too.

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 with the stock gallery, so you would need to install a third-party gallery (like Google's Photos) in order to work with them.

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 • Browsing albums • Browsing an album • 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.

Standalone video player

The Meizu Pro 7 Plus 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

Subtitles are supported, but it recognizes only Latin and Chinese characters.

Amazing audio output

The Meizu Pro 7 Plus was the loudest handset to go through our audio quality test in years. The handset simply blows its competitors away in that aspect, both with an active external amplifier and with headphones attached.

Better yet, the increase in volume doesn't come at the expense of accuracy of the output. The Meizu flagship did splendidly in the first part of the test and even headphones caused very minor degradation. An impressive showing indeed - truly among the best handsets we've seen in terms of audio output.

Meizu Pro 7 Plus frequency response

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