This year, it seems to be a genuine trend that retailers have embraced.
Brief history of Meizu: from MP3 player to smartphone
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Airbnb : Scaling human connection. Do Anything. Stripe : Help us build universal payments. HouseCanary : Most trusted source of home values. Zeus : Live where opportunity takes you. Astranis : Build satellites, get everyone online. The home panel is your typical 4 x 4 grid with the app dock hanging out at the bottom and a larger-than-usual status bar up top.
The bar, which is twice as thick as the standard Android option, displays the date and time on the left, with all notifications pushed to the right. Meizu also threw in the remaining battery capacity on the lower right portion of the bar.
As a side note, the status bar shrinks down to the normal size when you enter an application. The app dock is also unique. Up to five icons can reside within it, though only four can be switched around. The one app that isn't going anywhere is Meizu's very own web browser, which we'll return to in just a moment. Perhaps the most jarring change in the Flyme setup, however, is the omission of an app tray.
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What's more, you can have up to 12 pages to place your apps and widgets, and each one is created in exactly the same fashion dragging the app as far to the right as you can until a new panel appears. Having so many pages is frustrating, though, because the OS doesn't have a way of jumping to the panel of your choice, which means you have no choice but to swipe from page to page.
What if you just can't live without the app tray? Here's an easy solution: download a launcher that still supports one and your problem becomes a thing of the past. We installed Apex and were able to bring up a very familiar menu, complete with apps and widgets. By the way, multitasking also leans closer to Apple's approach: long-pressing the menu button brings up a horizontal bar with three layers. The middle layer is the most prominent, displaying four app icons at a time. To find more recent apps, just slide your finger to the left and you're treated to another set of four. Above these icons sits a button that enables you to close all of your open apps in one fell swoop.
If you prefer, you can still get rid of them one at a time by long-pressing icons until a large X appears below, after which you just drag and drop it. The bottom layer is reserved for a basic music player, which unfortunately doesn't appear to offer any support for third-party apps. The notification bar is also slightly different than what you'd typically expect.
The date and a "clear all" button hang out just above these. However, the most interesting part is over on the right: a drop-down menu allowing you to switch between WiFi networks and the type of mobile network you can choose between 3G-only, GSM-only or auto. Notifications can still be swiped away one at a time if necessary.
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Lastly, you can only drag the bar itself down as far as the bottom-most notification; in other words, if you don't have any to look at, the bar will only go down far enough to expose the quick controls found at the top. This may feel jarring to some, but we actually appreciated that the notification drop-down didn't unnecessarily obscure whatever it was we were looking at.
Despite its Apple-inspired layout, the device runs Ice Cream Sandwich -- version 4. This means you still have access to the Play Store and whatever widgets you want. But without an app tray, where can you find the widgets? They're in the settings menu, under "customize" -- not necessarily the first place you'd think to look, but it's there nonetheless. Fortunately, unlike last year's MX, you can place the same widget in more than one spot. Speaking of ICS, there are a few features missing from Flyme.
Face Unlock, for instance, is MIA, as is the data usage setting. Additionally, many of the core apps have been tweaked, the stock keyboard isn't included as an option, Android Beam isn't supported naturally, since NFC isn't onboard and so on. We're glad that third-party keyboard support is allowed on the MX, because we grew increasingly frustrated with the default option. Perhaps we've become spoiled by devices with larger screens, but the keys here are not only difficult to press accurately, they're arranged in left orientation.
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Faster typists will be concerned with the lack of autocorrect features, although word prediction is an option. It also took us a while to get used to the placement of the standard punctuation keys: instead of putting them with the other symbols or on a separate button, they're only accessible in the word prediction row when you hit the space bar. As with the previous MX, the Play Store is limited to just one download at a time, contrary to the standard Android style, which provides for multiple streams. In fact, it seems as though the official Google store has been put on the backburner, since it's tucked away in an obscure folder you can move it while the Flyme App Store sits front-and-center on your home screen.
This comes as no surprise, given the prevalence of alternative application markets found in China. Don't worry, these apps can still be downloaded easily enough. Of note is the ability to add your own Flyme account, which allows you to backup and restore your contacts, calendar, messages, call logs and settings whenever you need it.
You also have access to the aforementioned homegrown Flyme Store , which hooks you up with a repertoire of apps geared mainly toward the Chinese market. Don't get too excited, though -- it's relatively small, with roughly 20, apps added to its collection. The remote control feature we saw on the dual-core MX didn't make a return appearance on this particular version, but Meizu tells us that the feature is only taking a brief hiatus and we should be seeing it again in the future. We're hoping to see this re-enabled in a later update, but we won't hold our breath.
But enough about cool features that can't be found on the device -- let's discuss some more unique additions that can be used, like Flyme Voicemail. The service is similar to standard Visual Voicemail in the sense that you don't have to dial into your carrier's voicemail number to listen to your messages.
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But there are plenty of unique details here to make it a compelling concept in its own right. For instance, all of the messages are recorded locally and stored on the phone's Recorder app, which means you can listen to each voicemail immediately after the caller leaves it. You can also choose to have the feature enabled whenever there is no answer or even every time somebody calls.
It's a lovely idea, but it needs some work: none of the voicemail messages were very clear; the voices sounded garbled and extremely distorted.
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Additionally, the phone app allows you to record calls, and you can pick which parts of the conversation are recorded, just in case certain portions of the call need to stay off the record. In fact, you can even choose to have every conversation recorded automatically.
To be clear, the recordings won't be perfect -- while the mic picked up our voice well and offered crisp playback, the other side of the line came out just as garbled as it did on the Voicemail feature. Still, you can at least hear the recording well enough to make out what everybody is saying.
This might be a good time to remind folks it's best to make sure the person you're chatting with knows you're recording the conversation. You can also import and export contacts from the phone application, as well as filter out unwanted callers. Another Flyme-branded service is Flyme Messaging, which is essentially Meizu's equivalent of iMessage; it only works if both parties are registered on Flyme and online. Meet both of those requirements and your message will be sent using data instead of as a text.
Flyme even offers its own take on the standard smartphone timer: a multi-segmented timed task list. This means that instead of featuring just a single timer that needs to be reset every time you want to start a new task, you can set multiple timers, each beginning after the previous one ends. If that isn't enough, you can even set up multiple lists of timed tasks.
The music and video players on the 4-core have a different look and feel than you'll find on the corresponding apps in stock Android. The music app, for instance, sticks to Flyme's simple aesthetic, but still offers a five-setting EQ with a few pre-programmed genres including a custom option and the ability to set up playlists and folders.
The player adds an easy-access sleep timer for anyone who likes to fall asleep listening to their favorite Carly Rae Jepsen tunes. Finally, it also searches the internet to find lyrics and cover art for the song you're currently playing. It even scrolls through the lyrics in real-time, so you can sing along to your heart's content or skip ahead to your favorite verse.
This feature's performance ultimately depends on how eclectic your musical tastes are, and indeed, our results were mixed. Often, if the system is confused as to which artist or album it's looking for, it will give you a few possible options to choose from, and generally gets it right once you give it a nudge in the right direction. Other times, however, the player would download the right lyrics but the wrong version of the song we fired up New Order's "Temptation" but it pulled down Moby's cover.