Meizu went official with its mid-range M5S today and the smartphone is touted as coming out to take on the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 which just received a makeover recently. Both smartphones are mid-rangers and have a slight resemblance to each other in their designs. Even the specifications of both the Meizu M5S and Redmi Note 4 tend to overlap but we’ll draw a comparison between the two smartphones to see where they differ.

Design & Display – Meizu M5S vs Xiaomi Redmi Note 4

In the aspect of design, the Meizu M5S and Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 both feature premium, sleek designs but while the Meizu M5S comes with a 5.2-inch display with HD resolution and a 282 ppi, the Redmi Note 4 sports a 5.5-inch display with full HD resolution and 401 ppi. One distinct feature on the two smartphones is the absence of a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor on the M5S. Instead, the smartphone uses Meizu’s mBack fingerprint technology.

Meizu M5S

Both smartphones feature a fused antenna band design which is located at the top and bottom edges. The camera and flash are centrally located with the flash sitting under the rear camera in both smartphones. There are capacitive buttons on the side as well as a physical home button up front which performs dual role on Meizu M5S.

xiaomi redmi

Processor & Memory

The Meizu M5S is powered by an octa-core MediaTek MT6753 processor clocked at 1.3GHz with Mali T-720 GPU and supplemented by 3GB of RAM on all versions while the Redmi Note 4 packs a MediaTek MT6757 (Helio X20) chip which is a deca-core chip and is clocked at 2.1GHz with the Mali-T880 MP4 GPU. The M5S has two storage versions of 16GB and 32GB while the Redmi Note 4 has 16GB of storage on the standard version and 64GB of storage on the higher model. Xiaomi recently released a version of the Redmi Note 4 which comes with a Snapdragon 652 chipset in India and that is sort of an edge for those who love to see Qualcomm chips in their smartphones.

Xiaomi Redmi Note 4

Camera & Battery

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 packs a 13MP rear camera with f/2.0 aperture, PDAF and dual-tone LED flash while up front is a 5MP camera. The M5S on the other hand equally packs a 13MP rear camera with f/2.2 aperture and LED flash as well as a 5MP front-facing camera.

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 squarely thumps the Meizu M5s on the aspect of the battery they both pack. WHile the Redmi Note 4 packs a 4000mAh battery, the M5S crams a 3,000mAh battery under its hood. Meizu made up for that by including an 18W fast fast charging technology inside the M5S. Both smartphones come with dual SIM card / dual standby support and feature connectivity options like Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band, WiFi Direct, hotspot and lots more. The M5S runs on Flyme 5 while the Redmi Note 4 boots MIUI 8, both based on Android Marshmallow.

Meizu M5S

On a final note, we must add that both the Meizu M5S and Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 come with ultra-cheap price tags that don’t justify the premium looking design and rich specs lineup they feature.