With no doubts, one of the remarkable ways to describe 2014 is like the “Year of Selfies”, or perhaps, the year of selfie ascension, putting this aside. We have already seen many phones and brands creating camera-centric phones. The Vivo Xshot and the Oppo N3 are good examples, and now lesser known Meitu are in on the action with a Selfie-phone, the Meitu M4.
Meitu are well-known in China for their Beauty applications, and it wasn’t long ago we saw their Meitu M2 receive Tenna certification. The M2 has not been superceeded by the new Meitu M4 selfie-phone which launched earlier in the week.
The new model maintains the design of the old M2, keeping all the innovations of the M4 “under the hood”. The hardware, for example, has been upgraded to the new market standard, by replacing the old MT6592 with the excellent MT6752 64-bit 1.7 GHz SoC. The upgrades continue on the camera front with both front and rear sensors becoming Sony 13 Megapixel IMX214 units.
The great interest shown by the photographic industry was reflected also in the Meitu adoption of the Fujitsu Milbeaut chip, an image processor that allows a significant improvement in photo quality. The operating system MeiOS (based on Android 4.4.4) has been updated for the occasion too, and now also includes the new BeautyPlus App. Comparison photos below give us an idea of how all these technologies work together.
The rest of the hardware features include 2 GB RAM, 32 GB ROM and 720pHD4.7 inch Screen. The battery is only 2160 mAh.
The Meitu M4 is a niche product but if you want to be part of the elite group of owners you will be expected to pay 2199 Yuan (about 354USD) for the standard version or 2499 Yuan a special edition Hello Kitty model.
The Meitu M4 is an interesting concept, one that might do well in China, but we see them struggling due to pricing if they ever plan to launch abroad.