Meizu 16s Review: Powerful, Notchless Phone Crippled By Software By Slashdot

Hey, what's up guys beau HD here from Home calm, and this is the maze 16s a mid-tier smartphone that features many of the high-end specs one could expect to find in a $1000 flagship smartphone, but at roughly half the price, while the phone does work with some GSM carriers here in the United States, its main markets are India and Asia, and not really North. America I'll talk more about this later, but in the meantime, let's take a look at and see what's so special about this phone. First, I really like how there's no notch there's just a thin sliver of bezel at the top that houses, the 20 megapixel F 2.2 camera sensor and the call speaker that doubles as a loudspeaker to enable dual stereo speakers. Now this is one of the tiniest selfie cameras. I have ever seen in a smartphone, and the lack of a notch really helps make the front of the phone look spotless and elegant. There's a metal frame with a curved glass back, that's extremely slippery, but other than that the build is quite solid.

Unfortunately, there is no headphone jack on this phone, but that's pretty common for Chinese smartphones. Nowadays, jumping back to the front of the phone, we have a 6.2 inch, AMOLED display from Samsung, and it looks great. Colors are vibrant. Viewing angles are good with no significant color shifting, and it gets bright enough to view outdoors. The brightness isn't superior.

It could be better since there is no notch and the top bezel is so slim there's no room for any fancy. Facial recognition, sensors so instead maze has opted in for an in display fingerprint scanner. It uses the same technology as the sensor found in the OnePlus 60, but it works well to unlock the phone in a fairly consistent and quick manner. Now, unfortunately, where the phone really falls flat is in the software, it runs fly me a 7.3 which is a skin on top of android 9.0 Pi and in my experience it seems to be far too basic in functionality and just aesthetically unappealing. First, I couldn't find any ability to add drawer to the launcher.

So all of your apps are placed on the home screens and there are several pre-installed games and maze apps that you're going to have to just throw into a folder, and you're, always going to see that folder, because you have no app drawer, there's a bunch of different navigation, bars and gestures you can choose from, but I never found one that I really liked or found intuitive, so I, just stuck with the classic on-screen navigation buttons which take up more screen real estate and are really starting to look dated in bid 2019. Also, I noticed some inconsistencies with the animations, for example. Sometimes, when I would close an app, the window would minimize towards the app that I closed, but other times it would just minimize and fade into the center of the phone, which was a little strange. Last but not least, there's no quick, multitask action where, if you double press the overview button it is won't bring up. The last two recently used, apps I didn't realize how much I use this feature until I started using this phone.

Now with that said, it's not all bad. You do get some nifty customizable gestures to quickly open up certain apps. There's a built-in VPN and a screen recorder too, and performance really is quite good. The base model comes equipped with 128 gigabytes of internal storage, with 6 gigabytes of RAM and the latest and greatest Snapdragon 805 processor. That's right! This sub $500 phone features, the 855, CPU apps open up quickly and multitasking is fast I, actually like the multi window implementation, as you just slide down on an app in the overview, tray and tap multi window.

So you don't have to long press on the app icon, which takes a few seconds longer. Generally speaking, there's a lot of Chinese phones that have disgusting skins on top of Android. But what's so great about Android is you can customize a lot of different areas? So if you don't like the aesthetics of a skin, you can most likely change it with third-party application and, while I wanted to stick with a lot of the default settings and configurations here for testing, if I were going to use this phone as my daily driver for several weeks months years, whatever I would definitely cuss the hell out of this device and install a bunch of third-party apps. Now the cameras are interesting because there's a main 48 megapixel sensor on the rear, with an F 1.7 aperture and a secondary 20 megapixel telephoto sensor that enables up to a three times lossless zoom, the two times. Zoom seems to be the most crisp, but three times zoom is nice to have if you really need to get close up to a subject.

Overall, the camera performance is good for a mid-range smartphone, but it is clear that megapixels aren't everything with this camera in my testing, I found that the dynamic range isn't as strong as the cameras found in more premium phones as a lot of the times. The subject will appear darker than it should be, or the subject is well lit, but the background is overexposed. It could be finer tuned via a software update, I, suppose low-light performance also isn't superb, but once again it performs well for the price you are paying for this phone and environments with lots of lighting. This phone captures some great results with colors that pop generally speaking, the camera really only fall short to higher end cameras. If you nitpick most people should find this camera more than satisfactory when taking pictures in the standard auto mode.

It's the bells and whistles the portrait modes and other software features that don't work as well as many of the more expensive smartphones. I do want to say, though, that the six LED ring flash on the back. It gets really bright. I never used the flash for photography, but for navigating dark corridors. This flash is really nice to have, and video recording is actually one of these cameras strong points as the image stabilization is perfect.

It can record up to 4k, but the anti-shake functionality is only available in 720p and 1080p resolutions, so the sample footage you see here is 1080p, because I really wanted to show that image stabilization, which works really well. Maze, does a great job with the stabilization software here. As for battery life, the 3600 William hour battery lasts me a full day of honor it too heavy usage with some battery life to spare. There's no wireless charging, unfortunately, but you do get 24 watt fast charging, which is nice. There are stereo speakers, but the bottom speaker is louder than the front-facing call speaker, that's pretty common for around four hundred and seventy dollars.

The maze 16s could absolutely be worth it if you're in a supported market like India or Asia, I can totally recommend a notch. Free sub $500 smartphone with the latest and greatest snapdragon 85 chipsets, but if you're in the US, like I, am I, probably lean against buying this phone. Unless you really do your research and see which bans your carrier supports, I used the 16s with T-Mobile and while I got a stable, 4G LTE connection. Most of the time it did have trouble in more remote areas, there's also no Wi-Fi calling support, which is pretty important to me, because I don't really live in an area with a strong LTE connection to begin with, so I kind of have trouble with connection even with some supported flagship smartphones at the galaxy s 10, there were also a few times when I would be connected to Wi-Fi, but I wouldn't get internet for whatever reasons, so I'd have to toggle Wi-Fi on and off in order to load up a web page. So weird bug may be able to get fixed in a future update with all that said, if you're interested in this device I'll place a link down below in the description to a site where you can pick it up, and I'll do my best to answer any questions you may have in the comments down below.

So, if you have a question, let me know in a comment down below, as always: I'm BO HD from phone Doug, comm I, hope you enjoyed this video. Thank you for watching, and I will see you right back here in the next one, see ya.

Source : Slashdot