Meizu 16 Plus Unboxing & Hands-On Review (English) By TechTablets

So I'm back here with another flagship mobile phone, but this one here to unbox today and check out is from Maze. Now it's been a long time since they've looked at a Maze phone, the last one was about a year ago, in fact, over a year ago, but I've really always liked their design. Their build quality is very good, so this phone here didn't resort to a notch. It has slim bezels, a very nice body to screen to body ratio, and it has a Super AMOLED panel, which is 6.5 inches with a resolution of 2160 by 1080. It also has what that panel and in screen fingerprint reader. So this will be now the third mobile phone I'm checking out with this relatively new tech, and it's good to see it coming through with mobile phones.

So the battery capacity is 3570 William hours. It has an interesting camera on the rear. Quite well speak, you could say 12 megapixels, with an F 1.8 aperture 1.5 v, micrometer pixel size, which is kind of on the larger side there, but it does have optical image stabilization as well, which is for access optical image. Stabilization dual pixel, autofocus phase detection, autofocus I, must add there, so the focus should be perfect. Rock-Solid I've noticed that on other phones that have that tech, that they're normally really, really good, and it does have a 20, megapixel selfie camera on the front.

The box here you can see, is rather plain. It just says 16 plus on the front of it, and here we have the phone. So it looks like someone has already taken the screen particular office. Sadly so I'm not the first one to touch it so, the back of it. There also has a protector on it.

Take a look at the phone in detail in just a minute, but we'll have a look at what else is inside the box. So here we have possibly a case. Hopefully where they actually include a case would be nice. Yes, it looks like we do have one year, so this looks like a clear hard case. So they've just got some instruction.

Warranty thing here: that's all in Chinese a VIP card not really relevant to anyone outside of China- and here is our cable, so obviously USB to type C, and here is the case. So the case is a little differently. I can see that it's one of those hard start one. So not the typical CPU you'd get or the likes of Xiaomi, for example, so hard clear case it just sign and gives protection to the corners and inside the little box on the side we have the center, which has that fly me logo. So they always they use fly me OS, and it's Android 82.0 not 8.1, and here is our charger, which should be Qualcomm quick charge, 3 rated, which it is with a maximum rating of 12, volts, 2 amps. So just taking down the weight of the phone, it does feel relatively light, so it's 185 grams and just 7.7 millimeters thin, but that's without the camera. So what the camera does protrude a little as you can see.

That then brings it up to eight point seven, so it's only about a millimeter thick of the camera. So this is quite a stunning looking phone, so you'll see on the rear. There we've got that six LED flash it does include jewel-tone flash in there as well. So that's one of the trademarks really from Miku and in egg dual cameras on the back, so one is 12 megapixels with for access optical image, stabilization, dual pixel face detection autofocus, the secondary camera is 20 megapixels and that one has an aperture I. Think it's if 2.0 and the corners here they are rounded a very smooth glass-like finish on the back. That just looks really excellent.

That build quality and finish is spot-on. This is a premium mobile phone, so our sim tray on the side is just dual NATO SIM. Sadly, so there's no micro, SD card support and another no.4. This phone is no band xx for those that need it. For example, if you live in Sweden or Switzerland, I think where it's a common LTE band I just show you that it's metal there isn't a rubber gasket around the SIM tray either so no level of water protection or splash resistance or dust resistance.

Even there for dust getting in eventually to that SIM tray, but normally it's not a problem so down. The bottom is here: we've got this metal frame all around its rounded, and it has a polished metal. Look to it and feel a lot like these Samsung Galaxy, s8 and s9 you'll see. We've got a microphone loudspeaker, the type C port and the antenna lines. Now they didn't do anything stupid like removing the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack this. So it's great to see this on board a flagship.

The volume and power buttons are on the side. These are made out of metal, they don't rattle around. They have a very good feel to them. So everything on this phone is premium. You also see that we've got 2.5 d-class. There is our 20 megapixel front-facing camera with an F, 2.0 aperture and then the earpiece, so Miku solution for the earpiece without having to resort to a notch was to just push it right up to the top here, and I prefer this approach as many as you know, I'm, not a big fan of notches on fines and the bottom chin. You can see it's quite small, not large enough, really to have any capacitive menu keys in there, and here it is with the case on so a very minimalistic approach here for the protection personally I would like to have the sides fully covered there, because the sides are a little slippery and this is really just protecting the camera.

I guess against scratches on the lens. So, as you can see, if you place this flat down on a table, then that camera lens is not going to get scratched. Okay, so time to power it up. For the first time so holding down that power button I get a vibration. Those blacks are looking very deep because it is a Super AMOLED panel from Samsung and I mentioned that this is probably already being set up or put in English.

So fly me OS, as I mentioned before. Okay, so it is in Chinese, as you can see. As expected, it's a Chinese mobile phone, so I have to change it over into English. So take a look at those side: bezels look how slim they are very slim. This looks great and the screen.

So far is impressive. A Super AMOLED panel, of course, and blacks are looking deep. Now I can see with the ROM they've gone with quite a high DPI there. You can see because of the size of the text, and then the clock there as well, so obviously I think I've just got to swipe up get rid of the notifications there. It's just asking me about the cellular data, so I can enable that now it is actually set in English which surprised me, because all those notifications you swipe down with fly me, and you get other notifications, of course, I'm gonna, clear them all out now, but look at them all in Chinese.

So this is that one of the problems with this ROM that you're still going to get this you're still going to see Chinese on here. So it's a little annoying, so I'm, just going to kill all that off now, I can say that trading shins in have put Google Play store on there. For me, which is great so, yes, we do have some bloatware on here. One of them is called welfare center at the top. There don't know what that is about, and it's probably the translation gone wrong with something with one of me: zoos, Also system, apps.

There is a few things in there now. A lot of this actually isn't bloat, so it looks like there's a migration tool and download smart voice. They have some sort of smart assistant thing on here as well. I think when you hold down this button, no I think it's when you swipe. No, not swipe up so swipe up is to go to you're recent.

Well, there's that actual that assistant, that I was talking about, so I was just telling us a little there too long press and swipe. The navigation bar to continuously switch multiple apps okay. So the phone is running. Android 8.1, not Android 8.0, which I thought it might be: security patch levels from June the thirst, and it's flying me seven point one point three: now why my thumb is right here is because I'm covering up the IMEI numbers, which you should not expose publicly, because people could end up using them. Somebody go right ahead now and set up my fingerprint because I'm very curious to see how fast this is.

Will it be as fast as the eight Explorers, that was probably one of the fastest I've checked out so far, so I place, my finger, I'm going to use my actual, and I'm gonna use this finger. I was gonna, use my thumb, but that's in the way too much there. So, okay, you have to do this ten times. I would imagine- and it's not super quick all right, so the phone is unlocked. As you can see now sit up.

My fingerprint I've set up my face as well, so there is face unlocking what I'm going to do now is test the face: unlocking first, so I'm gonna, lock the phone and unlock it look at it and boom straight into the UI. That is very quick. Do that again? Okay, a little slower there! That's because I got the camera the tripod in the way, but now I want to just angle it away from me and use the fingerprint unlocking so lock it fingerprint. That's pretty quick, I think that's almost as quick as the me8 Explorer, maybe not quite as fast. Do that one more time.

Yes, that's about one two, almost two seconds about two seconds, but for me that is perfectly fine considering, or we don't have a fingerprint reader on the rear anymore. Okay. So looking at screen now and a little of detail of measure the brightness, and you have to turn off the automatic brightness in order to get maximum brightness, so it's similar to other phones when it does that, but normally other phones are actually the other way around, like Samsung, it tops out at 880 Lux. This is perfect, so in sunlight, you can make it out really well. I did test it just out from the balcony here, so the gamma comes out to be about 2.4 somewhere between 2.4 and 2.5. So it's a little off.

Ideally it should be around 2.2. That is when one of these bars pretty much looks the exact same color as the background image. Now the reason why the tick's looks so massive on the screen, as that is because miles go on with the DPI, so this is like basic scaling really for the display of 480, which is really huge, I'd like to see that a lot lower, something like 380 or whatever would be a lot better, even 420. So if I had a custom ROM on this, the first thing I would do was set that dpi a bit lower. Now real-world images.

They do look perfect on the screen and I think it's the gentile matrix they're, using with the pixels like. If you look really, really close, you can see it's that kind of angled position of each pixel, but I mean you need to look at it super close, so normal viewing distances. The screen looks perfectly fine. Unless you decide to break out a magnifying glass, will you really see any pixels on this, but overall, deep blacks, good colors, the reproduction? The white balances are a little off out of the box, but overall, very decent and, as mentioned super bright at 880 Lux. So the phone has 2 speakers.

We've got the earpiece, which doubles as a loudspeaker and I just want to mention the audio quality out of the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack, just tested it out. It sounds perfect to me. It could be a little louder, but it's clear, there's, no interference, there's no static, which is a good thing. Voice quality as well with calls I noticed. The earpiece is a bit better actually than others.

That's better than the. A so I think. I also think it's better, then my honor note tin the cool quality from that earpiece at the top. So that's also a loudspeakers. I'll give you a demonstration now of what to expect from the loudspeakers on this mobile phone, so one down the bottom and then that one all right.

So it's not the loudest speaker. You've heard from that, but I feel to me the volume is sufficient and now for the quality of it is okay, it's mostly just the meds and the bass that comes out the bottom speaker and more just triple from the top. So the top is just fooling a little of sound there and aiding it. The system that other manufacturers use as well, but overall there's loudspeaker to me, is good, so I'd love to show you the an tutu score, but I'm having problems here. I've been for the last 30 minutes, trying to get it to work.40 minutes almost and every time. I do this, you can test, and it just will not.

Work is trying to download the 3d bench. Data and I've used a PK mirror I've installed, APKs of use, Google Play, Store, Google Play still will not. Let me install it but expect a score of around 270,000 upwards DRM info reports as when I expected so security level 3. This means Netflix in HD, Full HD, that's not going to work. You need level 1 for that.

This happens. A lot with the Chinese tech. Here's just one of the cons, GPS working fine accuracy hovers around 4 of 5. Most of the time it doesn't tend to lock on to everything it sees for some reason. So not the greatest GPS performance compared to other Snapdragon 805 devices I have tested, but it is still good, though our wireless so testing out just the raw performance, basically between the phone and the router, you get around 400 megabits per second, so this is fast I mean this is faster than a lot of people's laptops, the wireless they have in their laptops.

Even wireless AC 4G speeds. Nothing wonderful here, so I can't get 4G in Spain there, as I mentioned, there is no ban 20. So if you need that in your country, then, as obviously it's not the phone to go for so the speeds aren't that great now this could be all dependent on the towel that was connected to how much use is going through it but seems to hover around here. So maybe it's not the optimum band. It's using for me here with 4G, but at least the speeds I mean they're.

Ok, these are more like 3G sort of speeds that we're getting there at the moment- internal storage, very quick. So it's UFS, 2.1 spec! You can see all the sequential reads and writes no problems and 0 bottom lots bottlenecks here from the storage, and this was the era I was getting with and 2, even when I tried to use Google Play store. So as you'd expect for the snapdragon 845 and the six gigabytes of ram that my version has and that fast storage. This is lineage 2 on the highest settings, and it is perfectly playable keeping up with everything you see the occasional little stutter just when things load in initially at the beginning, but that happens with every device that I have tested out there. So perfect gaming performance, ooh.

Other titles that are demanding as well, for example, pub G on the high settings. That's going to be playable the high frame rate with this chipset here and its everything looks perfect with this nice large immersive screen now have noticed that after gaming for 20 minutes that it is getting rather warm on the back, so just around this area here is obviously where the chipset is, and the thermal transfer pipe or the copper, heat sink and I just check those temperatures now. So it's getting up to around 32, almost 33 degrees there, which is still perfectly fine, but you do notice that it is getting warm now when taking a look at the ROM performance. Overall, it's slick, it's fast everything seems to load and quite good, as you expect for the storage and the spec of this phone here, no problems. There I really do like the display.

It's a very nice display here, as you can see, vibrant and hopefully that's coming through on camera. Just how good this look. So in person it looks even better liking, the slim bezels either side, so obviously with the UI. It's only got English and Chinese. There's no international ROM for this yet, and you will notice with some widgets like this one.

Here, for example, the translation isn't 100%, so there is still some Chinese here and there, but things like the dialer. For example. There is no Chinese in this, and sometimes you see that on Shelby's and English and Chinese only ROM you'll be some sort of contacts there, that'll pull through in Chinese, but not the case with this one. So getting used to the I/o I the way it works, using just this as the home button, and you're swiping up. That, of course, brings up all your recent apps and look how smooth this is.

That is with quite a few things loaded in there. Swapping between these apps is quite quick as well, so there 's's no real slowdowns or this phone that I have noticed in normal kind of use here. So your toggles from anywhere really just got a swipe down, and that brings in your toggles. You can see there was a perhaps a little of a delay there with that. So, but overall good performance here from the ROM.

Now a battery life I can see already just from estimates you're looking around eight to nine hours of continued on-screen time, it's at least a two day: battery life mobile phone charge times as well. I did a quick little test and my rough estimate remember. This is an estimate. Calculation is just over two and a half hours to fully charge this mobile, I believe and now looking at the camera. So this is the stock camera application.

We've got all your typical kind of modes here that you'd expect on the flagship. So funny snap is like Samsung said it's going to put like bunny rabbit ears on photos and things like that. Beautifying and all that thing that can make your eyes bigger. I won't show you an example of that, because I'm sure most people know what that's all about. So the portrait mode with the blurred backgrounds using the dual cameras, your photo mode, not a lot of settings in here really because all we've got is the time stamp device.

Watermark aspect ratio. Annette, really! Is it now one thing I've noticed it's slightly annoying with the video mode. That is that it will always tend to default, or whenever you reboot the system back to full HD and yeah. It's done it again. It's in fact, I haven't actually rebooted this I'm, pretty sure I just exited the camera app so video size.

You always have to go back in here and then set it to 4k all the time when you want to record in 4k. So we have optical image stabilization, but no electronic image stabilization, which is a little sad to see, but I'll give you some samples, but before I do that I will just show you the pro mode, which is the other one of interest: okay, slow mode as well so slow mode there. These are the settings. We have well, basically, nothing there for the slow mode, but I will show you here are pro mode. So pro mode, we've got the shutter rates, ISO exposure, your focus and then white balance.

Now this right here is your x, 2 modes, so you've got x, 2 up to x, 3, digital zoom. That's all it is an x 3, very grainy. I would probably never actually ever use that and there's something right here called 20 megapixels. So the high resolution photo mode, that's using their auxiliary sensor there with the F 2.0. So it's the sample, the front-facing camera.

It has an f 2.0, aperture and uneaten ATP maximum on this, and it does not have any electronic image stabilization on the front cam here. As you can see, it does shake around I roll the quality. It looks to be reasonable, but I really wish they would do what OnePlus are doing and far away and add some electronic image stabilization just to steady things out a little would make this video a lot more usable. So those are now the rear cameras, so I can shoot in 4k. Now you have to go into the settings each time almost each time and set it to 4k because.

It ends up defaulting back to 1080p, which is a little annoying. This used to happen on the old Xiaomi phones, so it has optical image stabilization. This is for access, and it's not as good as electronic image stabilization. Now I did test out open camera, and sadly it is not working with that electronic image stabilization. So the quality of the video there 4k itself seems right the focus.

Sometimes you see some hunting, which is a little of a surprise, considering it does have that dual pixel face detection autofocus. I just demonstrate that now, so it locks onto my hand here you can see it takes a little while, but the transition is rather fast. So the focus overall is not bad at all. Now, if I tap the times to and get some zoom here as you can see, but you need to hold it really still shakes over the place and then even hour times three zoom as well. You get the same for photos, but now you can definitely see that that's digital zoom and not so great, so I'll turn that off here.

So overall, the quality seems ok, but not quite as good as a feel as other flagships, because it is lacking an electronic image. Stabilization I'll just demonstrate again the stability of the video here, walking so not the greatest, alright guys. So to recap here, so we have an excellent bill quality here with the mezzo 16 plus it is premium very good. It reminds me a little at least the frame around the outside the finish of it and the color of Samsung's premium top ends like the Galaxy S8, the s9, and then the note 9 as well they're billed there in terms of that. So if you do drop it, the outside metal is going to ding up and have awful looking scratches and things.

So a case is highly recommended and more so because the back of it is also glass and if you're in winter, and you've got cold hands. This thing is super slippery, and even when you place it down on a table, it does tend to slide around a little there. So they have included that free case. It's a little cheap, but I'm not really having a go at them. I just think they should have maybe stepped up the case and put something that's slightly higher quality, considering that this phone is quite expensive for what it is.

So the screen is very nice Super AMOLED panel. No, now it's not a 1440p panel, so it's not super sharp, but at normal viewing distances like what you'd use like now, you don't see the pixels, it's perfectly fine, they're very bright too, but you must disable the auto brightness to really maximize that brightness. You just ramped up that setting on to the max, and then you get the 880 Lux and you do notice that, so it's perfect so in terms of battery life, I haven't done a full complete test of this, but I can see already from estimates that I'm getting from GCM battery monitor and just looking at it that you're going to be able to get at least about eight hours of continuing on screen time. That's the test that I normally do so just use it non-stop mostly on wireless and on data, expect slightly yes less than that, so it will be a two day: mobile phone, at least for most people, so very heavy use. It's going to definitely make it through a whole day, considering that it's got that 3517.

When you have our battery in there, so the loudspeakers they do sound good, not the loudest I've heard it's great to have a secondary loudspeaker in the earpiece. The earpiece quality seems quite good to me as well. It's better than my honor note: 10, there's one of my complaints for that particular mobile phone that there it tends to distort when you hear someone talking on the other end and not even higher or maximum volumes on the earpiece. But this one just sounds a little better there, which is a great there. So the UI fly me UI is not going to be for everyone, especially if you must have the UI in your own language.

So if you're you want to have it in German, for example, there's no option for that, so it's either English or Chinese, and even when you have it in English, the translation is mostly there for everything. But when it comes to your widgets, no I haven't noticed any bugs with my afternoon, using this, and I've noticed that their performance has been really quite good. Very smooth, good at multitasking, changing going through things so that front fingerprint reader I will just demonstrate that again so placed my finger there, and it unlocks. It is very fast. Now there was a sitting there that would first go to the lock screen.

Then you have to swipe up, or you would have the password there. Sorry, with the face, unlocking as well would do that so in the settings once you figure that out, you can have it just goes straight into the UI, so I'll demonstrate the face, unlocking again so just tap it now to unlock and then look at it and there we go I mean it unlocks. It's pretty quick, very quick. The fingerprint reader I think is maybe just a fraction slower than the show me, 8 Explorer Edition that I reviewed, but it overall perfect. So to me, the downfalls of this phone would be the lack of micro SD card support.

Even though we've got relatively high storage options, very fast storage as well, it would probably be the band 20 that some people may need and just the either you always the biggest thing, and I've also noticed to the cameras. I, don't think the video quality and the cameras in general Made can take a very good photo. I just feel that the optimization that Miku are not really up there, so it's not the best differently when it comes to camera quality due to their optimization I feel others. Do it better. Now, if you look at the main brands, like your Huawei, is your Samsung, your Apple, and all that those flagship phones will take a better photo I feel than this one right here.

So overall, very nice hardware is to some things with the software that will bug some people. So be that in mind, if you're going to be thinking about buying one of these, oh, and it's its also quite expensive, compared to other Chinese brands, Misha have always been up there with the price. Thanks a lot for watching this, a lengthy review and I do have to catch you back in the channel, with perhaps some follow-up videos of the model and other, of course, phones that will be coming out in the future.

Source : TechTablets