Meizu really do love the month of April with the launch of their Pro 6 phone, M3 note, and now their budget Meizu M3 making an appearance.
In the run up to the launch of the Meizu M3 there wasn’t quite the same excitement as the M3 Note and Pro 6 phones, and today with the launch we can kind of understand why as the phone is a simple update on the current M2.
Unlike its larger brother the Meizu Note M3, the M3 keeps hold of its polycarbonate body and range of bright colours (now including blue, pink ,gold, grey ,white and black). The screen is still a 5-inch unit but now has a more up to date 2.5D curve to it.
With a polycarbonate chassis the phone is thicker than a similar metal bodied device and we see the phone with an 8.4mm thickness with a battery size of 2870mAh and an overall weight of only 132g.
Generally the battery size would be cause for concern but as the budget Meizu has a smaller HD 720 x 1280 display, and will be running an efficient octacore MT6750 chipset we don’t think this will be an issue.
Gizchina News of the week
What we do find strange is that up until today all Chinese phones running a Mediatek MT6750 chipset were 3G only, but Meizu’s M3 has LTE support too. We assume that Meizu have used a piggyback LTE modem on the phone to offer full netcom 4G support for China plus VOLTE.
Like previous Meizu M range phones, the M3 has a SIM tray that will allow either dual SIM cards or a single SIM card plus a micro SD card of up to 128GB. Built-in storage is available in 16GB to 32GB of eMMC 5.0 and RAM will be offered in either 2GB or 3GB options.
Camera specs are 13 mega-pixel rear (F2.2) and 5 mega-pixel front (F2.0) which you will remember as the same as the Meizu M2 but the phone also features a claimed 0.2 second PDAF fast auto focus feature.
As for pricing, well the rumours were accurate with the base model 2GB + 16GB version of the Meizu M3 costing only 599 Yuan and the 3GB + 32GB model getting a slightly higher price of 799 Yuan ($92 – $123).
The problem is the battery life. If I can get a redmi 3 with 4100mah for the same price as meizu with 2800, then the choice of redmi 3 will be a no brainer. I havent seen any phone from meizu with more than 3000mah battery lately, Whats going on? Is the rent due Meizu?
Thing is, it’s way bigger. M2/M3 were an option for those don’t wanna go over 5in. The new one is a joke. Upgade like that is no upgrade at all.
I bet it’s a YunOS one too, which makes me think it was meant for Chinese market only.
For me, it isn’t just battery life to consider when comparing 5 inch phones (or any other size), I would look at weight as well. In this case, the Meizu m2 is only 132 grams while the Redmi 3 is 144. That’s quite heavy for a 5 inch phone so, if you want the bigger battery you have to put up with a heavier phone.
Meizu m3 note = 4100mah
It’s not the same price , the Meizu is 599CNY, the Redmi 3 is 699CNY -15.4$ more in China so you would pay up to 20$ more. You can also argue that the m3 Note is just 15.4$ above the Redmi 3. Anyway, different components,different OS so you can’t just compare battery sizes and decide battery life.
That’s what people do here they go just of the spec sheet and pretend everything else is equal. They don’t take into account different displays, processors, OS etc.