iPhone 6 vs Meizu MX4: Made in China vs Designed in China

Earlier this month, the Meizu MX4 became official. Last week, Apple's much-awaited iPhone 6 was unveiled. Both phones share a lot of similarities, such as having a user-interface that's minimalist, gorgeous and colourful. Let's see how they compare with each other when it comes to specifications.

Price

The Meizu MX4 is currently available for international pre-order at £276 (16GB variant), while the iPhone 6 went on pre-order recently for £539 (16GB variant) in the UK.

Design

Design wise, everything about the phone seems to be premium. Meizu's MX4 shell is made of aluminum-magnesium alloy and weighs 147g. It's quite thin too, at 8.9mm (the iPhone 6 is thinner at 6.9mm). Shoppers can choose from white, gold and grey colour options. To us, this seems to be inspired by the iPhone's range of colour options.

Apple has always used some of the best-in-class designs for its smartphones and the iPhone 6 is no exception. Apple uses a blend of anodised aluminium, stainless steel, and glass on the iPhone 6. The result? A premium phone that feels rather good in the hand.

Display

Apple uses a 5.5in LED-backlit IPS LCD display on the iPhone Plus. It has a resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels and a pixel density of 401ppi.

The MX4 uses a 5.36in IPS display of 1152x1920 resolution and Gorilla Glass 3 protection. The display happens to be rather detailed with a pixel density of 418 ppi.

Camera

The Meizu MX4 boasts of powerful imaging capabilities thanks to its 20.7MP Sony Exmor RS sensor with dual-LED dual-tone flash for better images in low-light conditions. The lens itself is also protected by Gorilla Glass 3. For videos, it can shoot footage at 4K at 30fps. The 2MP front camera is also a Sony sensor capable of capturing 1080p videos.

While Apple might be stubborn in retaining an 8 megapixel sensor, the company has made changes and additions to help it click pictures better and faster than before, meaning that one of the most practical smartphone cameras might have just become better. There's also a 1.2 megapixel camera up front for selfies and video chats.

For those of you who like shooting videos, highlights include the ability to grab 1080p high-definition clips at 60 frames per second, take 240-fps slow-motion shots, and provide cinematic video stabilisation. All that video can be stored on up to 128GB, depending on which version you go for.

Performance

While we would have preferred a Qualcomm chipset, Meizu uses the next best thing. The MX4 houses an octa-core CPU with four Cortex-A17 cores @ 2.2GHz and four Cortex-A7 cores @ 1.7GHz cores. Its big.LITTLE architecture will allow all eight cores to work simultaneously. The GPU used is the powerful quad-core PowerVR G6200, along with 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM.

The iPhone Plus 6 uses an A8 chipset. There's a dual-core 1.4 GHz Cyclone (ARM v8-based) CPU and a PowerVR GX6650 (hexa-core graphics) GPU. There's also a new M8 motion co-processor that builds upon the introductory M7 that debuted with the iPhone 5s.

It can distinguish between sports such as cycling and running. It also can calculate distance and elevation using an on-board barometer to measure air pressure changes. Other additions include NFC, the Touch ID fingerprint sensor and more.

Software

Meizu completely redesigned the user interface when it comes to Flyme OS 4.0. The design is flat and comes with several new features. Flyme 4.0 is also amongst the first skinned Android UI's to get the 4.4.4 KitKat update, next to Samsung, Sony and LG. Meizu added lots of animations in this iteration of Flyme, with motion blur being one of their most used effects and a slew of first party and third party icons have been redesigned by order to align with the design of the UI itself.

The result is a gorgeous looking UI that appears to work seamlessly and gets things done in style. There's also up to 40TB of cloud storage on offer from the company for all your storage needs.

With iOS 8, Apple continues to offer a clean, gorgeous looking smartphone experience. New additions include the freedom to use third-party keyboards, apart from several other features. As always, animations are minimal, wallpapers are gorgeous and everything works quickly.

Bottom Line

How to choose between them? Simple. If you don't mind spending £539 (usually much more since 16GB of memory won't do the trick), then the iPhone 6 makes for a sensible buy.

However, Meizu is offering a smartphone with similar performance powers, superior imaging and a gorgeous looking OS that's bound to win over iPhone fans. We recommend that you check out the phone's Flyme OS here to get an idea. The MX4 costs almost a third of the iPhone 6 and offers nothing sort of an excellent smartphone experience.