Chinese manufacturer Meizu has unveiled its latest flagship device, the MX4. It's a high-end, 5.36-inch phone that spares no expense in some components, but seems to go a little down market in others. The 4th-generation MX4 will be available later this month in China starting at 1800 Yuan (about $290) for the 16GB version, with the 32GB and 64GB versions going for 2000 and 2400 Yuan, respectively. eBay and other official import shops are pre-selling the 16GB model for $449.99.

It would be hard to deny that the MX4 is inspired by a certain i-Product, but then, Meizu has never been shy about their Apple aspirations. The Gorilla Glass 3 screen has a single capacitive home button beneath its very slim bezels, and the one-piece aluminum rear comes in white, grey, or (sigh) gold. For a relatively large phone, both the Z-height (8.9mm) and the screen bezels (2.6mm) are also quite thin. Even so, the body hides a 3100mAh battery, which Meizu is quick to point out comes from Sony, and bottom-firing speakers with a 100% volume increase over the MX3.

The battery isn't the only thing that comes from Sony. Meizu is also using the Exmor RS 20.7 megapixel camera sensor previously seen on top-of-the-line Xperia phones. This gives the MX4 access to 4K video recording, high-speed 100FPS video, and ISO values up to 1600. The front camera is a little weak by comparison at only 2MP. The MX4 also uses a Sharp IPS-LCD for the 1080p 5.36-inch screen, some of which will be permanently covered by virtual nav buttons, giving a "real" resolution of 1920x1152. Meizu claims that the screen covers an impressive 85% of the color gamut with a 1100:1 contrast ratio, and a has super-bright rating of 500 nits.

Underneath the phone will use an eight-core MediaTek processor running at a top speed of 2.2Ghz on the "big" cores. The GPU is a quad-core G6200 model from PowerVR. None of the major players in the US market use MediaTek chips for anything but budget models, so it will be interesting to see if the MX4 can keep up with the competition. 2GB of RAM certainly won't hurt in that regard. The phone has access to five network technologies: standard GSM, TD and FDD LTE, and the SWCDMA/WCDMA standards popular in China.

Meizu is loading the M4 with its semi-proprietary Flyme OS (which still sounds like some kind of a throat condition) based on Android 4.4. Again, the inspiration from the latest version of iOS is pretty undeniable, though you can occasionally see bits of Holo peeking through the interface.

Meizu is selling the MX4 as a pre-order on its own website, eBay, ComeBuy, and GearBest, and yes, Americans can import the phone without issue.

Source: Meizu