Meizu 16Xs will make you question $1,000 flagships

Chinese phone maker Meizu has a new phone out, and it’s one of those devices that makes you wonder whether you’ve overpaid for your current phone. 

The Meizu 16Xs got a 6.2-inch, notchless AMOLED screen with an in-display fingerprint sensor and reasonably sized, symmetrical bezels on top and bottom. On the back, there’s a triple, 48/8/5-megapixel camera. The phone is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 chip and has a beefy, 4,000mAh battery. 

Most importantly, it all costs just $245 for the 6GB/64GB variant, and $289 for the 6GB/128GB variant. 

Now, we’ve seen similar phones this year from the likes of Xiaomi and Oppo, but Meizu 16Xs (apart from that unwieldy name) might just claim the title of the best no-nonsense phone of the year. 

First, the 16-megapixel selfie camera is placed in the top bezel, which is still thin enough to make the phone look, well, like a bezel-less phone. I prefer this to both the various pop-up camera mechanisms and the notch, though I can’t speak about the quality of this tiny selfie camera until I try the phone out. 

Second, instead of pretending it had concocted the various features of the phone in a secret lab, Meizu openly highlights the fact that the most important parts of the 16Xs come from Samsung — both its 2,232 x 1,080 pixel screen and its 48-megapixel, S5KGM1 main camera sensor. And the mid-range Snapdragon 675 chip, while not the best you can buy, will still be plenty powerful for most users.  

Finally, at a time when so many phone makers are rushing once again to increase the size of phones past 6.5 inches, the 16Xs’s 6.2-inch size might feel just right to a lot of people. 

In the past, Meizu’s weakest link was the software, and again, it’s hard to judge whether there’ve been improvements in this area without trying the phone out. That aside, it appears that Meizu has a strong contender for anyone looking to get the most smartphone for their money. 

The Meizu 16Xs launches on June 10 in four colors: blue, orange, black and white. It will initially be available in China, and it’s coming to some EU countries and India in July.