Meizu announced the brand new Meizu 15 flagship today in China and we’ve got an early hands on with the device. Despite being less popular than competitors like Xiaomi and Huawei, Meizu has managed to gather a good fan following in China as well as abroad with its beautifully designed value for money smartphones. The new Meizu 15 is no exception, featuring top-end specs and a simple yet beautiful design. What’s best about the phone is that it doesn’t try to go with the recent notch trend. Instead, the Meizu 15 focuses on reducing the bezels up front, without messing up the essential features like the front camera or the fingerprint enabled home button.
First, let’s look at the front design in our Meizu 15 hands on.
The Meizu 15 slims down the bezels on the sides to a great extent. Even the bezels on the top and bottom are quite slim, making sure that the display takes up the maximum area up front. The notch design often ruins the symmetry in recent smartphones, but Meizu has made sure that the phone’s design is perfect with a centre placed front camera on top and a centre placed home button at the bottom. It’s a non-intrusive design and looks elegant. Talking about non-intrusive, you won’t even notice the ear piece on top, but it’s present above the front camera. Note that the display is still the standard 16:9 aspect ratio and not the new 18:9 or 19:9 one!
The home button is equipped with a fingerprint sensor and is pressure sensitive too. It is just like the halo button, so you can program a lot of functions depending upon the gesture. Moreover, you can disable the on screen buttons (and just use the home button) to open up more screen space.
Above you’ll find the different gestures available for the home button. (Please don’t mind the quality of this image as we had to take it during the event…)
The back of the Meizu 15 is equally beautiful. We got an early sample of the heavy gray color version of the model and it looked impressive. There’s nothing extraordinary about the design of the phone but it doesn’t necessarily has to be extra-ordinary to look good. Judging from the U shaped antenna lines, you already know that this is an all metal smartphone. But what’s special about the back is that the texture is painted and looks pretty cool. The antenna lines are also special because of its unique texture. The dual camera setup is placed at the centre along with a ring flash below it.
The phone is pretty slim and very comfortable to hold. The power button is located on the right, while the volume keys are on the left side. The bottom features all the ports including the USB Type-C port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and stereo speakers. One major complaint about the phone is unsurprisingly its software. The phone runs Flyme 7 with the old Android 7.1 Nougat on top. So still no Oreo for a 2018 Meizu flagship! That’s really disappointing.
Overall, Meizu seems to have got it right with the Meizu 15. Everything about the phone says its a premium device, and I’m sure notch haters will love this design, despite its simple appearance. You can read more about the specs and features of the device from our launch article soon.
More Meizu 15 Hands on images are added below! Let me know your thoughts about the phone’s design.
