Meizu M3 Note first impressions: Impressive design, decent specifications

Chinese smartphone maker Meizu has launched its latest phablet M3 Note in India. Priced at Rs 9,999 Meizu M3 Note comes in two variants -- one with 2GB RAM and 16GB internal storage and the other one with 3GB RAM and 32GB internal storage. We spent some time with the phone to find out what it’s like and here are our first impressions of it:

Design
Meizu M3 Note comes with an aluminium body, and doesn’t look much different from most smartphones in the budget segment, although that doesn’t mean that we were not happy with its look and feel. The phone has been launched in three colour variants -- white, silver and gold -- and the one we got was dressed in silver.

The front of the phone is dominated by the display, right below which is the fingerprint sensor of the phone. The non-removable back panel of Meizu M3 Note houses the camera, dual LED flash and the company branding. The volume rocker and the power buttons are sandwiched on the right edge of the phone and the sim card slot is on the left. The 3.5mm jack is placed on the top while the microUSB port and the speakers of the phone are placed at the bottom.



Although there is nothing about the design that stands out, we were still happy with the look and feel of the M3 Note. We found it to be common, but stylish nevertheless.

Display
Meizu M3 Note features a 5.5-inch Full HD 1080P display with 403 pixels per inch which we found to be quite responsive. The display showed bright and vibrant colours; however, we felt that there is scope of improvement in the viewing angles of the display.

We also found the screen to be reflective, which may make sunlight readability a little hard for the user.

Camera
The 13MP rear camera of Meizu M3 Note certainly isn’t among the top features of the smartphone. We clicked some pictures from the phone’s camera and we were left with a bag of mixed emotions. While the image quality was good, we were not very happy with the colour reproduction of M3 Note’s camera.

Having said that, we were happy with the job that the 5MP selfie camera of the phone did when we clicked a few images with it. Apart from the usual modes that are there in most phones, M3 Note’s camera comes with a mode that lets you creates GIFs.

Hardware
Powered by 1.8GHz Helio P10 octa-core processor, Meizu M3 Note comes in two variants -- one with 2GB RAM and 16GB internal storage and the other one with 3GB RAM and 32GB internal storage. Users have the option of expanding the available storage by installing microSD cards of up to 128GB.

The smartphone packs a 4,100mAh battery and comes with 4G LTE, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and NFC connectivity options.


Software
Meizu M3 Note runs Android 5.1 Lollipop skinned with the company's own Flyme OS. Like most smartphones these days, M3 Note has the app drawer integrated with homescreen.

The smartphone uses a highly customized version of Android, with everything from app icons to notification panel different from what they are in usual Android phones. The phone doesn’t even have key with the ‘back’ icon, and instead offers the arrow on top left of the screen like iOS devices.

In our opinion, the software of the phone is interesting and is definitely something we would want to explore more.

What we think
We used the device for sometime and we liked somethings about it, and were kind of disappointed with a few. Wait for our more comprehensive review of the phone to know