Can Meizu’s high-end flagship phone compete with the likes of Xiaomi or Apple?

The Meizu Pro 5 is the Meizu flagship, a phone that it says is the result of its “pursuit of the ultimate and perfection.” Fittingly, it’s also the Chinese startup’s costliest phone, coming in at over US$400 even domestically. The Pro 5 has been out for a while in China, but it has yet to be released in other major Meizu markets like India, so when I got a chance to take one for a spin, I couldn’t say no.

The hardware lives up to the hype

On the hardware front, the Pro 5 definitely lives up to expectations. It may not be China’s cheapest phone, but it still offers value for money. It’s got a very iPhone-esque look and feel, and it nearly rivals the thinness of Apple’s flagship device: it’s just 0.4mm thicker than an iPhone 6s. It On the inside it’s no slouch either, boasting an Exynos 7420 8-core 64-bit processor and 3 or 4 GB of RAM, depending on which model you purchase. My demo model was the 3 GB version, but it still felt ridiculously responsive and smooth.

This baby is thin.

The Pro 5 comes with a 21 MP, f/2.2 rear camera that can shoot video in 4K. That’s fairly standard for a high-end phone, and its performance in terms of both photos and videos was pretty good. When compared to the camera on my LG G4, it tended to produce photos with more contrast but less detail when zoomed in to full resolution, as you can see from the following sample photos I took of a fallen tree’s root system:

Meizu Pro 5:

The Meizu Pro 5’s photo: a larger coverage area and more contrast, but a bit blurrier in the full-res blowup.

LG G4:

The LG G4’s photo: less contrast, but more detail when viewed at full resolution.

And here’s a quick sample of what the Pro 5’s video looks like (downgraded somewhat by Youtube’s compression, of course).

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