Meizu Pro 6 Plus review: A very likeable phablet (but the price still remains mysterious)

Then there’s the question of how well the phone performs with intensive graphics. Here’s the same chart with the GFXBench Manhattan 3 benchmark:

To be clear, these are pretty intensive tests, and none are especially bad scores as such (graphical capability isn’t necessary for everyone, for starters), but despite this, the difference in performance is pretty stark. The Huawei Nova Plus, in particular, retails for just £14 less than we expect the Meizu Pro 6 Plus to go for, and you get much more bang for your buck by backing Meizu. Just nowhere near as much bang as you get from the £400 OnePlus 3T.

Despite this, using the Meizu Pro 6 Plus is a pleasure to use. Everything is quick and responsive, and it offers pretty much all the functionality you’d expect from a flagship handset – including 3D Touch, which still feels a bit like a gimmick to me, but nice to have for those who want it, I guess.

Its size also means that the phone holds a 3,400mAh battery, and stamina is suitably impressive. In our standard battery test – a looped 720p video in airplane mode, with screen brightness locked to 170cd/m2 – we found it took the Meizu Pro 6 Plus just over 18 hours to completely empty its battery. Nobody’s going to argue with that kind of stamina, even if it’s well short of the superhuman life Lenovo manage to eke out of the Moto Z Play. 

One important thing to note with Chinese handsets is that Google Play services – think Maps, Hangouts, YouTube and the Play Store itself – don’t come preinstalled. On some handsets, they’re blocked altogether. Thankfully, that’s not the case with the Meizu Pro 6 Plus, and installing the familiar services was a doddle.

Meizu Pro 6 Plus: Camera

The Pro 6 Plus’ camera is a 12-megapixel snapper with a bright f/2.0 aperture. It has a 1/2.9in sensor, with 1.25µm-sized pixels. As is so often the case with phone cameras, low-light shots proved a challenge, but I found that outdoor photographs with adequate lighting were bright, clear, sharp and bursting with detail.

The camera itself is fast and responsive, and the software is easy to use if a little on the simplistic side. It does have some nice extras, though, such as the ability to convert video footage into GIF format.

The front-facing camera is “just” a 5-megapixel camera – Meizu has sensibly eschewed the trend of going over the top in terms of selfie resolution – and suffice to say it’s absolutely fine for 99% of the population’s needs.

Meizu Pro 6 Plus: Verdict

The Meizu Pro 6 Plus is a very likeable phablet, then, but giving it a definitive verdict is kind of tricky when Meizu hasn’t yet announced the UK price. This would be a killer bargain for £250, but a disappointment at £600.

Our estimate of £400 feels about right, and means it’s a strong competitor. In fact, at that price point, it virtually has the phablet field to itself. The Huawei Mate 9 is great, but a third more expensive, while this feels a big improvement on the £384 Nova Plus and £500 HTC Evo 10.

If you don’t care about having that much screen real estate, things get a bit trickier, though. The OnePlus 3T is a better handset – just 0.7in smaller – and it costs the same, making it something of a no-brainer. But Meizu shouldn’t feel bad about that – that’s a problem every manufacturer is having, from Samsung through to Sony.

In fact, the company can be very pleased with the Meizu Pro 6 Plus, confident in the knowledge that – £400 price point assumed – they’ve made a solid phone at a solid price. This is another good example of why Chinese handsets may begin to dominate the British high street in the next 18 months.