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.

The post Meizu 15 Hands On: A No-Nonsense Beautiful Flagship Design appeared first on Gizmochina.

Back when the rumors and leaks revealed that the Meizu M6S was not going to feature the company’s popular mBack home button, many were disappointed. The reaction wasn’t surprising because mBack was often considered one of the best ways to navigate the phone and losing such an important feature was never going to go well with the company’s fans. However, little did we know that Meizu had a big surprise for us. Well, they did tease us that they had a surprise, but we weren’t expecting a next generation version of the mBack, which the company is calling the Super mBack. Some even call it the Halo button.

Regardless of its name, the button incorporates all of the features of the mBack button with the help of a small halo circle on the screen. It looks easy to use and in the first demo that we saw, the usage felt pretty simple and natural.

By implementing a pressure sensor below the display, we are able to offer all mBack features in our new Halo button. pic.twitter.com/rGp8OxydAv

— Ard Boudeling (@ArdCB) January 17, 2018

For making this work, Meizu has added a pressure sensor chip below the display along with a linear vibration motor. The tech seems to be from NextInput, a company focused on force sensing solution for touch displays. Considering there’s a vibration motor below the display, the gestures should give good feedback as well, making them feel more natural.

Meizu’s Head of Global Marketing, Ard Boudeling was kind enough to give us all a demo of the Super mBack halo button on twitter.

Here’s a quick demo. pic.twitter.com/RQmdz7rXrT

— Ard Boudeling (@ArdCB) January 17, 2018

And these are gestures.

Our new Halo button implements all mBack features, and more.

– Touch to go back.
– Press to go home.
– Long-press to sleep.
– Swipe left/right to switch apps.
– Swipe up to multitask.

And one last gesture… Can anyone guess?

— Ard Boudeling (@ArdCB) January 17, 2018

Finally, if you don’t like the new Super mBack Halo button, you can always switch back to the default Android navigation buttons.

Once again, it looks like Meizu has done a fine job in making navigation on its smartphones super easy.

What do you think?

The post Here’s How The Meizu Super mBack Halo Button Works (Video) appeared first on Gizmochina.