#yellowchilli

The Meizu 4-core review (in short)

click through for the full text.

+++++ battery life is absolutely solid. 1700mah is no longer considered big these days- just look at the GS3’s 2100mah and the Razr Maxx’s 3000mah. And yet on Low CPU (800mhz) setting, the phone lasted 30 hours. on High (1400mhz) the phone lasted 24 hours. This is with autosync off, native email client synching every 15mins, 3 benchmark tests per charge cycle tested and other normal usage scenarios. in other words, other than gaming, there is no need for any frugality whatsoever. 

++++ native browser is very fast, smooth and speedy. feels faster than Chrome, even.

++++ notification area is the most minimalistic and yet the most functional yet- the notification comes down only as much as is needed, and within it, there is quick access to all available wifi signals, 2G, 3G and auto network selection options and you can also toggle wifi on or off, data connection on off, GPS, autosync..

------ OS has stability problems- phone crashes and restarts once a day (when I was looking). At first I attempted to find the app that was causing it but really, there’s no reason why the OS can crash and burn because of one little app. There’s got to be something wrong deep down. Meizu needs to fix this.

----- unable to set defaults- that includes Launchers, browsers etc.

----- native browser does not support sharing to other apps- a very odd but an obviously deliberate decision.

----- Google+ instant upload FC (force closes)- as of this moment, 5 days after the release of the device, Google+’s instant upload still force closes every time. This may be very disappointing for people who rely on this feature to automatically upload their photos. It’s not yet possible to identify who is responsible here.

--- audio / system stutters slightly when the phone’s been in use for around a day without a reboot. this happens especially when 3G data is in use. Makes for a rather unpleasant media performance, mostly. -- FlymeOS is overly user-friendly and hid or moved a lot of the useful under the hood features. Fear not- an official vanilla ICS ROM has been promised.