Meizu M3 Note: An Android iPhone Wannabe

It's undoubtedly the first thing you'll notice about the Meizu M3 Note. The back is in that iPhone style. It's aluminium and smooth and has metallic lines on the top and bottom.

For all that, it doesn't feel like an iPhone when you hold it. The Meizu M3 Note is an Android phone coming into the crowded budget segment at a price of Rs 9,999 and it competes with Xiaomi's Redmi Note 3 and Micromax's Yu Yunicorn, just launched yesterday.

What's Special?
The looks of this Chinese phone are one of its biggest assets. No doubt anyone holding that phone will get a lot of "Oh is that the iPhone?" comments. The Meizu M3 Note really tries hard to be an iPhone though, even on the inside. First, it has no app drawer and everything will just be on the Home screens. There's an attempt to keep the icons simple and the overall look neat. Then there's no Back button --- as you use the phone you discover that a swipe on the Home button takes you back one screen. On top of that, the Home button does double duty as a fingerprint sensor -- though not a very great one.

The other thing that's special is that in a relatively large but light phone, you get a 4,100mAh battery. Enough or a day and a half.

What's the Downside?
The 5.5-inch full HD (1080p) display with 2.5D curved glass is fairly adequate and represents colours well. But sunlight friendliness is decidedly low, which is a problem in a country where one has to go about outside in the bright hot summer often.

Another disappointment is the camera. By now, users expect to do a lot of photo shooting and sharing and want their phones to give them a certain minimum quality of images. The Note 3's 13MP camera does a strange job with colours, making things look murky. This becomes more evident indoors and in low light. The 5MP camera is however doing its own bit of beautifying and will probably be acceptable enough.

The device that's being sold features 3GB RAM with Mediatek's Helio P10 processor but reviewers' devices had 2GB to work with. Performance wasn't stellar and I can only hope customers are having a better time of it. The word going around is that this device won't upgrade to Marshmallow on Android, so that's another little worry.

My bigger problem however was with Meizu's Flyme interface with its choices of settings and features. You have to hunt around hard for some things. I also thoroughly disliked the swipe-up that brings a card style app switching to the screen. It's not easy to use and one has to swipe several times to coax the cards out.

This phone has no FM Radio but it is a Dual SIM and it supports 4G. You can use two nano SIMs or a nano SIM and micro SD card.