Meizu PRO 5 official unveiled. A premium flagship that could take on the Note5

Today Meizu has announced the PRO 5, a new premium flagship smart phone which has the means to take on the best Android smart phones available today. With Samsung dominating benchmarks with its own in house developed components, you won’t be surprised to see Meizu putting the best possible specs to raise the bar higher.

At 5.7 inch, it has the same display size as the Galaxy Note5 and home ground rival Mi Note. Instead of having a Quad HD display, Meizu is settling for a more traditional Full HD AMOLED display that comes encased under a 2.5D glass. Design wise, it retains the same unibody metal design as the past flagships like the MX4 Pro and the MX5. At the front, it has a home button that doubles up as a fingerprint scanner. The new generation fingerprint scanner is said to be quicker with 0.5 second response time when touched in any direction.

The hardware underneath is where it gets a little interesting. It runs on the same Exynos 7420 processor as the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy Note5 that’s mated to either 3GB or 4GB of DDR4 RAM. On top of that, it also utilises Samsung’s Universal Flash Storage (UFS 2.0) which is faster and more efficient compared to typical eMMC 5.0 storage.

With its own optimisation, the Meizu PRO 5 smashes the Galaxy S6 in Antutu benchmarks scoring over 77,000 points. There are 2 variants available, with the 3GB RAM paired with 32GB of storage, while the higher 4GB RAM variant gets 64GB of storage.

In the imaging department, the back gets Sony’s new IMX230 21MP camera with Phase Detection AF, Laser Auto Focus assistance and dual-LED flash. Meanwhile the front gets a 5MP f/2.0 shooter that comes with its own beautification features. For sound, the PRO 5 boasts Hi-Fi quality audio with its additional ES9018K2M DAC and OPA1612 OP Amp.

Keeping the lights on, the Meizu PRO 5 is juiced up by a 3,050mAh capacity battery which comes with its mCharge 2.0 feature. With a faster 24W fast charger, it can charge up from 0-65% in just 30 minutes. That’s faster than Samsung but it is still a notch below OPPO’s VOOC Flash Charger that does 0-75% in the same duration. Meizu has also ditched the old school microUSB port for a reversible USB Type C that’s currently used on the latest MacBook, OnePlus 2, Nokia N1 and the recently announced Xiaomi Mi 4c.

In terms of connectivity, it supports dual-SIMs with 4G LTE and the 2nd slot accepts microSD with expandable storage up to 128GB extra. Out of the box, it runs on Android 5.1 but with a heavily skinned FlymeOS 5.0 running on top.

The Meizu PRO 5 is priced at 2,799CNY (about RM1,908) for the 32GB version while its bigger 64GB model is priced at 3,099CNY (about RM2,112). That’s quite a huge step up from its previous flagships, encroaching the price range of its mainstream rivals. Nevertheless, it is still quite an interesting alternative considering it packs the same high performance hardware as the Galaxy S6. For more info, you can check out the Meizu PRO 5 product page.

Meizu PRO 5 Product Images