Phones coming out of China are getting better and better, and the Meizu Pro 5 is one beautiful piece of machinery.

Sadly, while the flagship device is undoubtedly well-made, it's entirely let down by Flyme OS, Meizu's custom Android interface that comes installed on the phone.

See also: 10 ways to squeeze more battery life from your Android phone

First, a little background about Meizu: The 13-year-old company began as an MP3 device maker (remember those?) before it decided to move to making smartphones in 2007. Since it started, it's been steadily targeting the high-end with phones that boast advanced features and expensive components relative to what you can typically get for the cost.

In China, Meizu is a far smaller player than larger names like Xiaomi, but has continued to carve out its niche as a maker of high-performance yet competitively-priced devices.

The Meizu Pro 5, which sells for $500 (64GB) and $450 (32GB), is no exception.

Premium design and power

The phone has a unibody brushed-metal housing that feels great in the hand; it has solid, smoothed edges. It's about the same size as an iPhone 6S Plus, but just a tiny bit thicker. In Asia, there's a growing preference for larger devices that are still easy to hold with one hand.

Side-by-side with an iPhone 6S Plus (left), the resemblance is rather uncanny.

The Pro 5 is Meizu's flagship, and as such it's been generous with the device's specs. The 5.7-inch Super AMOLED display is crisp and bright. The phone's powered by the same Exynos 7420 that also powers Samsung's flagship Galaxy S6 phone andNote 5 phablet, so it certainly packs a punch. It ships standard with 3GB of RAM, but power users may want to opt for the 4GB version.

Meizu Pro 5 (left), iPhone 6S Plus (right)

As with its previous models, Meizu has also put in some newer features, such as a USB Type-C charging port. This is a step in the right direction — USB-C is robust, and it's reversible — but until the rest of the mobile ecosystem catches up, you're going to have to ensure you've got extra USB-C cables lying around if you want to charge your phone while you're at the office or in the car.

Sideview of the Meizu Pro 5.

Great camera

Meizu certainly didn't scrimp on the one thing that most users care about. The 21-megapixel rear-facing camera is accompanied by a 5-megapixel front-facing snapper for selfies.

Its rear sensor (the digital "film" that captures the image) is a Sony-made BSI (backside illuminated) sensor, and Meizu's fitted a decent f/2.2 aperture lens on top of it. Meizu says its autofocus technology relies on phase detection and is laser assisted, geek speak for fast autofocusing. In my experience, the autofocusing was pretty quick; the camera didn't need to hunt, trying to focus on something most of the time. Occasionally, the camera missed shots of fast-moving subjects like children or pets, but no camera is perfect.

Against the iPhone 6S Plus's camera, the Meizu Pro 5 held its own. Images right out of the camera had just a wee bit more magenta than the iPhone 6S Plus, but colors were still natural and not displeasing.

Up close with tricky lighting situations such as a bright window scene, the iPhone retained more detail outside. At parts where the lighting is blown-out, the images reveal that the Meizu lens suffered from some chromatic aberration (the purple ghosting at bright parts) and lighting bleeding into dark areas.

Thanks to the BSI sensor, whose design is made to allow more light to hit it, the Meizu also showed decent noise control in dim lighting.

Both the iPhone and Meizu preserved detail in this up-close shot of a plant that wasn't lit well, but the Meizu shot was a little softer. Although the Meizu metered the shot more brightly, a 100% crop of the shot shows that the image was still noise-free.

Spot-on fingerprint scanner

The speed and reliability of Meizu's fingerprint scanner really impressed me. It's as fast as the improved iPhone 6S scanner, and not as finicky as the earlier iPhone 6's scanner, which was both slower and required a fuller thumbprint to unlock the phone.

Setting a fingerprint — if you have an iPhone, this'll look familiar.

User interface doesn't add up

The phone runs an operating system called Flyme, Meizu's version of an Android fork called YunOS that was made by Alibaba. The custom skin clearly has its heart in the right place — it tries to simplify and clean up the interface and make the learning curve less steep for new users.

In doing so, Flyme OS ends up resembling iOS in many ways, deliberately or otherwise. Its apps are laid out on its home screen on multiple pages, for instance. This feels a lot cleaner than many Android interfaces, which hide apps away in an "app drawer" and bog down the interface with resource-hungry bells and whistles.

Flyme OS

Unlike other custom Chinese versions of Android, which don't support the official Google ecosystem, Flyme OS started offering the Google Play store in 2014 alongside its own alternative app store. As with most unofficial app stores, users should be careful when downloading from there, because you might not recognize a sinister app that happens to make it through.

Although the phone comes with Google Play, it doesn't automatically rely on Google for typical functions like backing up or email (Gmail isn't the default client). I still decided to manually download Gmail, mostly because Flyme OS's email app was so unintuitive. The Flyme OS email app expects the user to manually input IMAP or POP settings when adding email accounts — does anyone outside of an IT person remember those settings offhand? Even iOS's default email app can figure that out for most popular email services.

So close to perfect

Meizu Pro 5 lockscreen

Meizu has also chosen not to build in a separate back button, or support it onscreen with a virtual key. So let me save you 10 minutes: Triggering the "back" function (often needed in the Android experience) is done by lightly tapping — not depressing — the physical home button. It's easy now that you know, but took me 10 frustrating minutes to figure it out.

If you're keen to explore a realm outside Android, Meizu's just announced an Ubuntu version of the Pro 5. Same device hardware, but running the Linux OS, which could present more of a challenge for users accustomed to Android and iOS.

For one, Ubuntu's interface is a departure from apps, and instead presents information in what it calls "scopes." It groups contextual information together, such as restaurants nearby along with weather. With other app-based OSes, you would typically jump into a weather app for weather information, and go to a separate app for nearby restaurants.

Power users might be intrigued by having the Ubuntu name on a phone, but by the looks of early peeks at Ubuntu interface, it appears to be far less intuitive than Android as a whole. The OS itself seems to be less polished than Android or iOS, and suffers from performance issues according to some folks who have tried it out.

Based on the hardware alone, the Meizu Pro 5 is undoubtedly worth the money and will delight users who care about pure performance and specs. But it'll probably be even better for power users who know how to flash the device and install stock Android on it. At least for now, Meizu, leave the software to Google.