Two days back, Meizu ‘the Chinese giant’ released Meizu M6T aka Meizu Blue Charm 6T. Today, we already have the complete Meizu M6T review with us. So, let us start with a question. Is it possible for a 799 yuan or $125 flagship to feature a full-screen display, premium built, the best camera configuration and good performance? Well, Meizu M6T is the answer. If you are a camera-loving techie, you will surely love Meizu M6T. The flagship is a perfect rival to Xiaomi Redmi Note 5, Redmi 5, Nokia 6 (2018), ZTE Blade, and other low and mid-tier smartphones.

Let’s dive into the details, and reveal the goods and the bads of this underdog in Meizu M6T review:

Meizu M6T Review – An Underdog With Exceptional Camera Performance

Specification Sheet

Design & Appearance

If you are a Meizu enthusiast or follow Meizu smartphone releases, you may know that Meizu provides the most premium built smartphones in China. Flagships such as Meizu 15 and Meizu PRO 6 are company’s masterpieces. Such quality smartphones which can easily outstand Apple’s iPhone series. In short, the quality, the holding experience, and the built is what Meizu is known for.

Meizu M6T is no exception. Despite being under $150, the flagship doesn’t look or feel cheap at all. It molds from polycarbonate rather than plastic, similar to OnePlus 5. Thus, you can expect a 145 grams lightweight experience while holding the phone. But this isn’t what provides the flagship a premium feel. Instead, the color coating imported from the aerospace and car manufacturers is what makes the phone sleek, smooth, and delicate to the hands. Unlike Redmi 5 or Redmi Note 5, the chassis of M6T features a unibody design with no invisible antenna section making it simple and plain.

The phone follows the latest full-screen 18:9 trend. It has an average thickness of 8.4mm. But, unlike most full-screen flagships which are over 6-inches, Meizu 6T appears to be the most compact of them all being a 5.7-incher. That is why the phone has a perfect grip in one hand. People with small hands might find it suitable rather than those heavy 6-inches phones. Seriously, am I the only one who thinks smartphones such be compact rather than large? A 5.5-inch or a 5.7-inch is good enough to fit in those hands or pockets.

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On the front, we have the 5.7-inch full-screen panel, with an aspect ratio of 18:9 for a wider display suitable for watching movies and games. The earpiece, proximity sensor, front camera, and LED notification embeds on the top front. Meanwhile, there’s only a small circle home key at the chin similar to Meizu 15. Moreover, it appears that Meizu is gradually making that key as the signature. Summing it up, the chin and the forehead occupies the same space on the front. Too bad, we didn’t get to see a top-notch or narrow forehead or chin in Meizu M6T. Wait, what! You simply can’t get such layout under $150. At least, the phone follows the latest full-screen trend which is what’s best for now.

Moving to the rear, we have the dual LED-flash, a dual camera arranged in vertical position followed by a rear fingerprint reader. Sadly, Meizu features the signature ring-shaped LED flash in its premium flagships such as Meizu PRO 6, so we will be missing it in Meizu M6T. There isn’t any innovation seen on the phone apart from that front circular button. The rear appears to be alluring thanks to the fine and silky color coating and the fingerprint module surface surely contrast with it.

The bezels are somewhat narrow in comparison to other cheap full-screen smartphones, still, they are clearly visible. Before the arrival of the full-screen era, smartphones used to have much thinner bezels in combination with 2.5D glass, they weren’t even noticeable. Like previous Meizu phones, this one also uses 2.5D glass to make it look a bit curvy.

It is worth mentioning that for the sake of beauty that the bottom and the top of the fuselage Charm Blue 6T is symmetrical, so it looks more concise and orderly with the 3.5mm audio jack (top) and Micro-USB port (bottom). The buttons on the right as well as the SIM slot on the left are also made of polycarbonate and embeds precisely in the chassis.

Summing the whole thing up, Meizu, as always, provides the world the best-built phone under any price tag. Meizu M6T despite being an upper low-end phone reflects an elegant, plain and simple unibody design which serves as one of the highlights of the phone.

Screen & Display

Meizu M6T integrates a 5.7-inch 18:9 full-screen display with a HD+ (1440 x 720 pixels) resolution. This is where Redmi Note 5 beats this phone with a Full-HD+ display. However, having an HD+ display is perfectly fine for a low-end flagship. But already compromising the performance, the display should have been better.

Speaking of the good side, the display has a nice brightness of 450 cd/m2 and is suitable for outdoor use and for a better durability it has GFF full lamination on it making it anti-scratch. One can operate it with gloves or wet hands as it supports glove mode and wet hands.

Hardware & Performance

The hardware isn’t the best part about the flagship to talk about. MediaTek’s MT6750 isn’t the best low-end SoC on the market. The credit goes to the MediaTek and Meizu sworn alliance that allows it to power Meizu M6T. It’s an octa-core (A-53) processor running @1.5GHz and accompanied by T860 MP2 as the GPU, Meanwhile, 3/4GB RAM an 32/64GB (also supports SD card up to 128GB) accompanies the SoC. MediaTek MT6750 is an upgrade of MT6737 which supports 1080p video decoding. However, what’s the point of using it if there’s no Full-HD display at all? Snapdragon 430 or Helio P23 would have been a better choice. Meizu covers the down point of SoC by offering 4GB RAM. ***Remember, the generous might support multitasking but can’t improve the SoC performance***

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However, the bright side is that there are similar Meizu phones such as Meizu Blue Charm 5 and 6, so we can expect better optimization for it. To judge the performance of the flagship, we did multiple tests including Antutu, Geekbench, GFXBench, PCMark, and Androbench. Moreover, we played King of Glory mobile game on it as well. Here are the results:

1) AnTuTu Benchmark Test (To Check Overall Performance)

Intro: The world’s first mobile phone/tablet hardware performance evaluation tool can comprehensively examine the performance of various aspects of the equipment, including user experience, and visualize the ranking. It supports multiple mainstream platforms, running points can be compared across platforms. The test comprises CPU, GPU, Memory, UX, and finally the total performance.

Meizu M6T 4GB version scored 50390 points which are way impressive than MediaTek MT6750 usual 40,000 points score. The credit goes to the UX as well as the optimizations are done for better performance.

2) GeekBench Test (To Check CPU Performance)

Intro: GeekBench Introduction: Cross-platform CPU performance testing tools can accurately reflect the device’s CPU single-core, multi-core performance. Test load simulation of real-life application design, the result is more meaningful, but also to measure the GPU graphics computing performance. It’s a detailed test comprising of Single-core and Multi-core performance.

The single core performance (612 points) was satisfactory, but the multi-core performance was good (2506 points).

3) GFXBench Test (To Check GPU performance)

Intro: The cross-platform, cross-API 3D benchmark software accurately reflects the graphics performance of the device’s GPU. Multiple test scenarios can fully examine the OpenGL ES graphics performance of the device and perform battery life tests. GFXBench offers OnScreen and OffScreen test methods. When the screen is running with the native resolution of the device screen, the off-screen display is unified to 1080p resolution, facilitating cross-device comparison.

The offscreen frame rates per second were average. However, as the screen is 720p, the on-screen fps will be great.

4) PCMark Test (To Check Daily Usage Performance)

Intro: PCMark is a test software that considers the overall performance. This performance can accurately reflect the processing performance of the daily use of the smartphone, multiple daily test scenarios, such as web browsing, video editing, document writing, picture editing, etc. It should be noted that PCMark’s lean-to-energy ratio is higher, which means that the higher the score of the mobile phone the more balanced power consumption and performance it is.

In the PCMark test, it scored around 3365 points, thanks to the power-efficient SoC and HD+ screen. The phone can meet the needs of moderate users but might be sluggish in high-end tasks like playing games on high graphics.

5) Androbench test (To Check Memory Performance)

Intro: AndroBench is a benchmark application that measures the 4K random storage performance of Android devices, including internal or external storage.

Meizu M6T has a sequential reading speed of 270MB/s which is great considering the low-end specs.

In short, Meizu M6T performance is probably the downside in Meizu M6T review. It’s good that the flagship has generous 3/4GB RAM as an upper low-end flagship. However, when it comes to high-end tasks, M6T might disappoint you where nor the HD+ screen or the optimizations can make the speed better. Indeed, nothing is perfect. Meizu sacrifices its performance at the cost of stupendous budget-friendly price.

Camera & Samples

Now talking about the greatest selling point in Meizu M6T review is its camera. This time Meizu has to offer the best camera performance under the $150 or $125 category.

Starting with the rear 13 MP + 2 MP megapixel dual cameras. The main camera uses the Sony IMX278 RGBW four-color sensor. The RGBW sensor can increase the colorless filter area on the color filter to make CMOS. Furthermore, the image receives more extraneous light to enhance dark light imaging. As well as the addition of multi-frame noise reduction technology, it also preserves more details of shadows on the software level and enhances the low light photo experience. Charm Blue 6T’s 13 MP main camera is responsible for framing and focusing, meanwhile, the 2 MP (Omnivision OV13855) is responsible for distance measurement, which brings hardware-level virtualization, can show a clear, sharp edges of virtual imaging.

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Here are the daylight, low light, night pictures shot from the rear camera of Meizu M6T:

1) Daylight Samples

Charm Blue 6T’s macro shot performance is very good. It clearly distinguishes the details of the site, including the tiny details of each place, even there’s no shaking after amplification.

In terms of color, the M6T restore more true colors. However, some of the scenes will be somewhat white. This is because some scenes for the backlight environment will produce a slight overexposure.

Thanks to the back dual lens shot, the M6T features background blur. We can see the blur is very accurate. Even the edges of the object remained sharp, which is very worthy of praise.

2) Low light / Nightlight Samples

The low light performance of the rear camera is amazing. Usually, a low-end phone easily fails in a low light or nightlight shooting. Meizu M6T is an exception.

M6T night close-up performance is clear enough. In the samples, enlarged details can be distinguished, including the details of the model’s clothes, which also shows that it has ample amount of light, so as to retain enough details.

In the night light, Charm Blue 6T camera performance is praising. The neon text is clearly readable without overexposure and the noise control is also relatively good.

As far as the front camera is concerned, it uses the beauty algorithm. The front 8MP make the human skin more bright, soft and natural, along with no large-scale smear marks.

The phone outperforms Mi A1 background blur, as well as Redmi Note 5, Huawei P20 Lite, Vivo V9 rear camera. Isn’t it the best camera phone under $125?

OS & Connectivity

Meizu M6T runs on Flyme 6, a customized Android OS by Meizu. Flyme is considered to be one of the best OS after MIUI in China, however, like the rest of the Chinese customized UI, the updates aren’t that frequent. While most brands are moving to Android 8.0, Meizu struggles at Android 7.1.

Besides the updates, the optimizations in Flyme are exceptional. Even a low-end smartphone such as Meizu M6T runs smoothly saving maximum battery life as possible. Being a part of full-screen smartphones uses the new Super mBack full-screen gesture interaction.

Battery Life

Meizu M6T is powered by a 3300mAh battery. Now the battery capacity might appear to give you mediocre battery life. However, that’s not the case. The HD+ screen, a low-end hardware, and system optimizations save the day. We did many tests in this Meizu M6T review to double check the battery timing.

1) Online Video Playback Test

At a battery level of 65%, an online video playback (40% volume, 50% brightness) test was conducted to check the battery life.

After 30 minutes, M6T dropped to only 59% and consumed 6% of power. Thus, the phone can easily play an online 9 hour HD video on a single charge.

2) Gaming Testing

3) PCMark Life Test

Intro: PCMark Life Test is a test to check the battery life of a smartphone/tablet. The test was conducted on 30% brightness, 20% volume, and connected to Wi-Fi.

Even with the 3300 mAh battery, the battery life of the Charm Blue 6T PCMark can reach nearly nine hours. This achievement makes it possible for moderate users to use it for one day on a single charge without any problems.

4) Charging Test

Meizu M6T aka Blue Charm 6T started charging from 5%. It was connected to WiFi, no SIM inserted, recorded every 10 minutes.

It took around 135 minutes for the battery to reach from 5% to 100%.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Exceptional Camera Performance
• Long-lasting Battery Life
• 3/4GB RAM
• Great Finishing

Cons

• Mediocre Processor
• Still runs on Android 7.1

Our Verdict

Meizu M6T is for those who don’t want to spend much but don’t want to miss exceptional camera performance and features.

Price & Availability

Meizu M6T aka Blue Charm 6T is available in two variants standard (3GB+32GB) for a price of 799 Yuan ($125) and higher (4GB+64GB) version for 999 Yuan ($156). It comes in three color choices: champagne gold, black stone, and coral red. The phone will start selling on June 1.

The international availability of the phone is in question as Meizu says that it’s exclusive to China only. We will inform you when it’s available for global purchase via Chinese stores such as Gearbest, Aliexpress, and others.