The Meizu 16s was unveiled at an event in China today. This is Meizu’s first flagship phone for the year. While it might look like a slight upgrade in terms of design over the Meizu 16th from last year, don’t be deceived. The Meizu 16s is bigger, better and more powerful.

Meizu 16s Design

The 16s was designed by Meizu‘s founder, Jack Wong. The phone has been crafted to fit snugly into your palm as a result of its arc design which curves at an angle of 0.5°. Its ultra-slim body also makes it more comfortable to hold.

The bezels are thinner now with the chin measuring 4.2mm. The 6.2-inch Super AMOLED display which uses a COF bonding technique and has curved corners allows for a screen-to-body ratio of 91.53%. The display has a VDE Blue-light certified protection which blocks up to 33% of harmful blue light. The display also supports DC dimming.

Just like the Meizu 16th, the 16s has an in-display fingerprint scanner supplied by Goodix. Meizu says the fingerprint scanner underwent debugging over 45,000 times and is now 100% faster. It also works better with wet hands and supports AliPay, WeChat Pay, and Google Pay.

Meizu 16s Specs

The Meizu 16s comes with a Snapdragon 855 processor and pairs it with 6GB or 8GB of RAM and 128GB or 256GB of UFS 2.1 storage. The 256GB version will be exclusive to China and all variants do not support storage expansion.

The phone has dual rear cameras which occupy a new position on the back. The primary sensor is a 48MP Sony IMX586 sensor with an f/1.7 aperture and 4-axis OIS. As a result of the sensor’s Quad Bayer array, the Meizu 16s can take impressive low-light images. The secondary camera is a 20MP Sony IMX350 sensor with an f/2.6 aperture. There are a bunch of camera features such as Dual Super Night Scene, Portrait Bokeh Mode, and AI scene recognition.

The front camera has also been improved. The 20MP Samsung 3T2 selfie camera which launched this year features the world’s smallest front-facing lens. The Meizu 16s is actually the first phone in the world to use the sensor. It has front-facing HDR+ thanks to Meizu’s multi-frame composition algorithm. It also has Meizu’s ArcSoft algorithm for clean and sharp selfie photos. There is support for face unlock which is pretty fast, unlocking in just 0.2s.

The Snapdragon 855’s Adreno 640 GPU works with Meizu’s Hyper Gaming technology for smooth and lag-free mobile gaming. There is also mEngine 3.0 which provides an immersive gaming experience when playing games like BuildTopia.

Another key upgrade of the Meizu 16s is its bigger battery capacity. The battery capacity has been raised from 3010mAh in the Meizu 16th to 3600mAh. That increase in battery capacity results in a slight increase in the phone’s thickness from 7.3mm to 7.6mm. Even at that, the Meizu 16s is still thinner than the Galaxy S10 and the Xiaomi Mi 9 which pack smaller batteries.

The Meizu 16s has NFC with payment support. It also has stereo speakers for surround sound audio.

The Meizu 16s comes in three colors. You can choose the classy Carbon Black variant which has a carbon fiber texture under its nano-scale coating, or the Pearl White variant that has a plasma polish finish. There is also the Phantom Blue variant which is inspired by the Strait of Mozambique.

READ MORE: Meizu applies for a pop-up camera smartphone design patent in China

Price and Availability

The phone has a starting price of CNY 3198 (~$475) for the 6+128GB version, moves up to CNY 3498 (~$520) for the 8+128GB version and stops at CNY 3998 (~$595) for the 8+256GB version. It is already available for pre-order on the official website and will be available for purchase at midnight on April 26.

Sadly, Meizu didn’t announce a Plus variant or the 16T gaming variant.

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