Technology
Button-less and hole-less Meizu Zero Android phone costs $1,299
Do you miss your headphone jack on your expensive iPhone? Quit crying because at least it isn’t the Meizu Zero phone, which has no buttons, no ports, and no speaker holes whatsoever.
Announced earlier this month, the Zero phone takes minimalism to the extreme, leapfrogging even Apple’s seeming dislike for buttons and ports. The bragging rights won’t come cheap: The hole-less phone is priced at $1,299.
Chinese phone maker Meizu’s selling the Zero on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo with devices expected to be delivered in April.
What’s a phone without any buttons, speaker holes, SIM card slot, or charging port get you then?
Fairly flagship specs, actually. The Zero’s got a large 5.99-inch AMOLED display and Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chip.
In place of mechanical buttons (power and volume buttons), the phone uses “virtual side buttons” activated by “pressure-sensing technology” with haptic feedback. We imagine it’s similar to the vibrational buttons on the HTC U12+. Though, we hope they’re more responsive.
Instead of a USB-C port for charging, the Zero uses Meizu’s own “Super mCharge Wireless” technology to fast charge at an output of 18-watts. For data transfer, there’s a wireless chip for “wireless USB” capable of transferring data over the air at speeds as fast as a physical USB 3.0 port.
Replacing traditional speaker grilles and earpieces is an in-screen audio technology that uses the screen as a transceiver, much like the piezoelectric tech inside of the original Xiaomi Mi Mix.
Similarly, there’s no SIM card tray or a physical fingerprint sensor. Instead, the Zero uses digital eSIMs and has an in-display fingerprint reader.
There are benefits to a hole-less phone. Most notable, is it allows for a clean unibody ceramic design without any cutouts to interrupt it. It also better seals the phone from water and dust. That said, if any point fails, it’s not as easily repairable.
A hole-less phone seems like it would be the final form of a phone — just one continuous slab of glass and metal. And we even envisioned such a device with our iPhone 2020 concept design. Meizu’s jumping the gun before Apple does. But is it taking minimalism too far? Who wants to buy a Zero and let us know?
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