Meizu M5s might be coming late to the series, but the phone has a certain charm worthy of our attention. The M5s is akin to the M5 in lots of ways, but the choice of materials and chipset are not among those.
Meizu has chosen a premium metal build for the M5s, while the M5 was keeping the budget low with a plastic shell. Oddly, the company has demoted the MT6750 chipset down to the MT6753 (don't mind the numbers), which powered the m2 note back in mid-2015.
We appreciate the M5s metal body, and we'd sure take its exterior over the M5's. But the MT6753 chip is the elephant in the room and addressing it will be a lot more challenging that picking metal over plastic.
The Meizu M5s receives our shorter review treatment, though we are not dropping our long articles, so don't panic. Our goal is to give you our impressions in a concise manner, but without sacrificing the performance assessment and the results from the full tests, we normally perform. We hope you enjoy it.
Meizu M5s has the same dimensions as the M5, but it has gained 5g courtesy of its new anodized metal body. The design takes after the already available Meizu M5 Note, and if it weren't for the small difference in display size, it would have been hard to tell those two apart.
The retail package of the Meizu M5s is basic - there is a microUSB cable and a charger plug but no headphones.
The real surprise here is that Meizu ships the M5s with a fast charger, which is a rarity in this price range. The bundled charger provides up to 24W of power (it can work at 5V/2A, 9V/2A and 12V/2A), which is incredibly high, but according to Meizu, the phone's charging maxes out at 18W (which is still as fast as Qualcomm's QuickCharge 3.0). The fast charging tech inside the Meizu M5s is proprietary and not Mediatek's Pump Express Fast Charging.
The M5s returns to the made-of-metal league and the metal back is welcome. We see the mandatory antenna strips, which are made of plastic, but they blend in quite nicely with the rest of the matte surface. Finally, we like the glossy silver lines emphasizing the antenna borders even though we've seen those on quite a few phones already so they've turned into a bit of a design cliche already.
The glass with 2.5D edges covering the front makes for an upmarket look and feel. The 5.2" screen has an IPS LCD panel with 720p resolution, and that amounts to a pixel density of 287ppi. Its viewing angles are excellent - wide and with no color distortion, while its sunlight legibility is about average with a score of 2.580.
The 5.2" display has a maximum brightness of 407nits and an average contrast of 1:955. The color rendering is mediocre - the average deviation in color accuracy is DeltaE 7.3 and playing with the color settings won't help you achieve much better.
Display test | 100% brightness | ||
Black, cd/m2 | White, cd/m2 | ||
0.426 | 407 | 955 | |
0.453 | 480 | 1060 | |
0.614 | 463 | 754 | |
0.42 | 520 | 1238 | |
0.43 | 518 | 1205 | |
0.475 | 528 | 1112 | |
0.53 | 426 | 804 | |
0.00 | 353 | ∞ |
The mTouch key is what easily becomes a favorite feature in any recent Meizu smartphone. It's an all-in-one button with three functions - tap for Back, click for Home, and there is an embedded fingerprint scanner for when the screen is locked. Even though the biometric sensor isn't on when the screen is off, it's very fast, accurate, and is capable of recognizing your fingerprint from any direction.
The M5s is powered by a 3,000 mAh battery - about the same capacity as the cell inside the Meizu M5. The M5s scored a mediocre 56-hour endurance rating in our battery test, considerably down from the 76h score we recorded with the M5 and the relatively poor performance in standby is to blame.
Unlike the regular model, the new "s" comes with Meizu's mCharge solution, which in our tests filled up 45% of the battery capacity in 30 minutes even though Meizu claims a slightly faster charging speed. The supplied charger is a 24W one, but Meizu claims the phone can only charge with up to 18W of power.
Meizu M5s is a dual-SIM phone, but it uses a hybrid slot so you would have to make the choice of using either a second SIM or a microSD card.
The phone can come with either 16GB or 32GB storage capacity - getting the higher capacity would allow you to skip using the microSD card so you can slot in a second SIM card without any worries.
The SIM tray is on the left • the SIM/microSD hybrid slot • the bottom • the microUSB port
Finally, the bottom of the M5s is where the audio jack, the microUSB connectivity port, and the loudspeaker are. The primary mic is also around.
The M5s speaker scored a Good mark in our loudness test, less than a decibel short of the Very Good achievement. Subjectively, it doesn’t sound particularly good at all - it's better than the M5 but worse than the M5 Note.
Speakerphone test | Voice, dB | Ringing | Overall score | |
62.0 | 67.5 | 69.4 | Below Average | |
63.1 | 67.3 | 71.3 | Average | |
66.1 | 65.5 | 70.6 | Average | |
63.7 | 69.1 | 82.5 | Good | |
65.4 | 69.1 | 84.2 | Good | |
62.6 | 73.1 | 83.4 | Very Good | |
70.8 | 70.9 | 77.4 | Very Good | |
65.1 | 70.7 | 86.8 | Very Good | |
83.1 | 74.5 | 85.0 | Excellent |
Its been always p10 or its younger brother..i guess it got decent performance..but weak graphics.. I saw with x series chipset graphics were decent too..if meizu produce devices with x 20 or 25 instead p 20 it would be great..
A coupLe of slides about peak performance that is hardly impactful (1 test for cpu and maybe two for gpu would be enough). Absolutely no mention of the capacity to retain background apps and how many (probably the most important metric for every day ...
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