Meizu’s M6 is a budget phone that’s keen to be a premium product

Meizu wants its new M6 smartphone to look its absolute best, and rather than muscle its way into territory occupied by the M6 Note or Pro 7 with a full-on premium metal body, it has decided to deck the phone out in the tech equivalent of an off-the-peg suit. The back of the Meizu M6 may look like metal in the pictures, but it’s not, it’s polycarbonate. That means the lines which look like antenna bands aren’t actually functional, they’re just for show. That’s right. Fake antenna bands have arrived.

To achieve the metal look, the M6’s body has undergone a process called Non-Conductive Vacuum Metallization, which adds a metallic film over the surface for a high-quality finish. The bands change the look of the M6 over the Meizu M5C, which had a clean minimalist style. Love it or hate it, the M6 is definitely eye-catching. Giving the M6 a premium look hasn’t affected the price. Although the international price hasn’t been confirmed yet, the local Chinese price of the M6 converts over to between $105 and $135, depending on the model.

That’s exceptionally good value for any Android smartphone, so what is the specification like? There are two models available, one with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal memory and a second with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. Both have an octa-core processor, but Meizu hasn’t mentioned the manufacturer, and if it was a Qualcomm chip like the M6 Note, we feel it would have said so. This means a MediaTek chip is more likely.

A 13-megapixel camera is on the back, and an 8-megapixel selfie camera with an f/2.0 aperture lives on the front. The screen measures 5.2-inches and has a 1280 x 720 pixel resolution, there is a fingerprint sensor below the display, space for a MicroSD card in the hybrid SIM tray, a 3,070mAh battery, and Meizu’s Flyme 6 user interface is placed over Android Nougat. A choice of gold, silver, black, or a very fetching blue color schemes will be available. Meizu phones aren’t sold officially in the United States or the United Kingdom, but are available through importers. The release date hasn’t been confirmed yet.