Meizu Releases The 16s: 48MP and Snapdragon 855

[harlan4096]

Meizu is one of the Chinese vendors that we had covered early on over the last few years. One of the early issues with the company’s flagships is that they most often lacked the proper frequency bands for western networks, particularly the lack of B20 for European carriers, even though the company's mid- and low-range products are very much prevalent in some European markets such as France. The company last year looked to address this issue, in coincidence with the switch from Samsung’s Exynos SoCs to Qualcomm’s newest Snapdragons, and introduced the Meizu 16 and 16th with the Snapdragon 710 and Snapdragon 845 with dedicated overseas models.

Today’s announcement is about the new Meizu 16s – a full hardware refresh of last year’s models including the brand-new Snapdragon 855 and a new camera sensor, as well as an internal redesign to accommodate a notably bigger battery.

Powered by the new Snapdragon 855 SoC, the new Meizu 16s allows the company to be among the first to employ the new generation SoC in this year’s products. Qualcomm’s new SoC this year impressed a lot and will certainly be a solid foundation for the 16s.

The phone comes with either 6 or 8GB of LPDDR4X with 128GB or 256GB of storage, however the 8+256GB combination won’t be available outside of China.

Although the new 16s seems like a hardware upgrade to the 16th, it’s also very much a design upgrade, if you look closely enough. Meizu still maintains a 1080 OLED display, however the screen has grown bigger to 6.2”. This increase however didn’t come at a cost of a bigger phone though, as the 16s retains the largely the same form-factor as its predecessor. Instead Meizu was able to further reduce the top and bottom bezels of the design and elongate the screen aspect-ratio.

The screen continues to be AMOLED and the panel is supplied by Samsung. Meizu advertises that it calibrated the screen of the 16s down to an accuracy of 1.5 JNCD and says it’s ahead of the competition in this regard.

Also introduced in the 16 and now upgraded in the 16s, is the new under-screen fingerprint sensor which is said to have doubled its unlocking speed.

Continue Reading