Meizu announced the launch of three new smartphones today that will make up their new Meizu 15 series of smartphones. The new devices stick to some older design cues from the smartphone market, sticking with some bezels, a 16:9 aspect ratio for the displays, and no signs of a notch anywhere. The hardware included suggests Meizu is targeting mid-tier buyers and while solid, nothing really stands out so the company may go for pricing as their unique selling point.
The three new devices include the Meizu 15, the Meizu 15 Plus and the Meizu 15 Lite. The devices all get AMOLED displays with the Meizu 15 Plus getting a 5.95-inch display running at a QuadHD resolution while the other two devices get standard HD for a 5.46-inch unit. Along with small-ish bezels on the front of the devices, Meizu includes a round home button that doubles as the fingerprint scanner. All of the devices get a metal body and a back that mimics glass.
To provide processing power, Meizu has turned to three different chips. For the Meizu 15 and Meizu 15 Lite, Snapdragon chips are used – a 660 and a 626 respectively. For the Meizu 15 Plus, the company turned to Samsung and used their Exynos 8895 processor. The Meizu 15 and Meizu 15 Lite each get 4GB of RAM and 64GB of onboard storage, although the Meizu 15 does have the option to bump of storage to 128GB. The Meizu Plus comes with 6GB of RAM and options for 64 or 128 GB of storage.
For cameras, both the Meizu 15 and Meizu 15 Plus get dual lenses with 12 MP and 20 MP sensors used on the back. The Meizu 15 Lite gets a single lens camera that captures images with a 13MP sensor. All of the devices get a 20MP front-facing camera. The two smaller units come equipped with 3,000 mAh batteries while the Meizu 15 Plus gets a 3,500 mAh battery.
Although Android Oreo has been out for a while now, Meizu sticks with Android 7.1 for the devices. They apparently hope to make up for being a bit behind with the operating system by giving the units a fresh update to their interface layer, bumping it up to Flyme 7. The update includes mostly back end improvements and changes and users will benefit from updates to Meizu's artificial intelligence called Open Mind.
The Meizu 15 will come with the most color choices, being available in black, blue, gold and white. The Meizu 15 Plus gets gray, black and gold as color option while the Meizu 15 Lite will be available in black, gold or red. Initial availability is expected to be limited to China, possibly as early as today for pre-orders. This should expand to other markets where Meizu has a presence over the next few weeks.
