Meizu Pro 7 Plus review: The phone that will transform the way you take selfies

It seems like every year, manufacturers update the internal specs and the operating system of their latest device, but there’s rarely any dramatic innovation or something to get excited about.

That’s not the case with the Meizu Pro 7 Plus, which features not one, but two full-colour displays screens: a regular sized one at the front and another, smaller, full-colour display at the back that, among other things, allows users to accurately frame selfies taken with the higher-quality rear camera.

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Meizu Pro 7 Plus review: What you need to know

The Meizu Pro 7 Plus is a 5.7in smartphone that has two displays, a 1440p display around the front, and a secondary 2in AMOLED display at the rear. That secondary display allows you to quickly glance at the time, weather and notifications and even provides access to the rear-facing camera for full-resolution selfies.

At only £488 there’s not much to dislike from the Meizu Pro 7 Plus. It has a snappy performance, thanks to its ten-core Helio X30 processor and 6GB of RAM. It has an impressive front- and rear-facing camera, incredibly good audio reproduction, and great build quality.

Its only shortfall is finding one to buy in the UK. If you can source one, the Meizu Pro 7 Plus is arguably one of the best phones on the market.

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Meizu Pro 7 Plus review: Price and competition

At the time of writing, you’ll only find the Meizu Pro 7 Plus at Geekbuying.com for around £488. If you’re having difficulty finding one, the smaller (and largely identical in its deca-core guise) 5.2in non-Plus variant is more widely available – from GearBest, AliExpress and Geekbuying.com – and it’s cheaper too, at around £350.

It’s also worth noting that the Meizu Pro 7 phones don’t support the 4G 800MHz (Band 20) and the 2G & 3G 900MHz (Band 8) frequencies, which are used by certain mobile operators in the UK. This, however, doesn’t cause a problem as it supports the 2G & 4G 1,800MHz (Band 3), 3G 2,100MHz (Band 1) and 4G 2600MHz (Band 7) frequencies, which are also used by UK operators.

As for competition, there aren’t any, really as no other phone has a dual-screen display like it. Nevertheless, there are a few phones you might want to consider as alternatives. For starters its predecessor, the Meizu Pro 6 Plus that now costs around £290. Then, there’s the 18:9 Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus at around £640, the regular S8 at around £550, and the LG G6 at around £420.

There’s also the incredible OnePlus 5 for around £450, and the new Nokia 8 for around £500.

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Meizu Pro 7 Plus review: Design and build quality

The first thing I noticed when I picked up the phone was its secondary display that Meizu rather pretentiously labels the “Fenêtre” (that’s French for window, in case you didn’t know). It measures 2in across the diagonal, has a resolution of 240 x 536 and it’s a full-colour AMOLED screen, activating automatically when the phone’s gyroscope detects motion.

Through it, you can view the time, weather, step counter and notifications, which you can navigate through by swiping left and right. That’s not all. By swiping up or down on the display, you can access a simplified camera app, and because the screen is full colour, it displays a preview too, so you can take and frame a selfie using the phone’s better-quality rear-facing camera.

It does have its limitations, though. You can only cycle through three camera modes: “Blur”, “Beauty” and “Original”. I’d like it to include the option to enable flash and jump straight into a video recording.

The phone’s design is splendid. With a slate black finish and rounded edges, the phone is comfortable to hold. A front-mounted fingerprint sensor doubles up as a home and back button.

On the left-hand side, there’s a dual nano-SIM tray. Unfortunately, there’s no expandable storage on top of the 64GB (or 128GB) of internal storage space, but you do get a regular headphone jack, which is located alongside the phone’s USB Type-C charger port and speaker grille on the bottom edge. One disappointment here is that the phone isn’t waterproof, water-resistant or dustproof.

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Meizu Pro 7 Plus review: Display

The Pro 7’s main 5.7in display has a resolution of 1,440 x 2,560 and pixel density of 518ppi. That’s sharp enough so you can’t see the pixels and since this is a Super AMOLED panel its contrast ratio and black level are simply stunning.

The Meizu Pro 7 Plus has four display modes to choose from: Adaptive, Standard, Photo and Dynamic. Tested with the i1 Display Pro calibrator, Standard mode equates the sRGB colour space, achieving 94% gamut coverage, with excellent colour accuracy. Photo mode aligns itself to the Adobe RGB colour space, with a 92% gamut coverage, and wasn’t quite as colour accurate, but still good.

I preferred to use the phone in Dynamic mode, as colours pop and are much more vibrant. This, however, negatively affects colour accuracy, and colours are noticeably off their intended target.

The one slight issue is peak brightness, since it’s an AMOLED panel. The Meizu Pro 7 Plus achieves 428cd/m² with the brightness slider adjusted all the way to the maximum level. This is bright enough to ensure readability in most conditions, but you might need to shield the screen on a really sunny day.

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Meizu Pro 7 Plus review: Software

The Meizu Pro 7 Plus runs on Android 7 Nougat with the company’s custom Flyme (version 6.1.2) overlay.

It runs smoothly, but there are several drawbacks from its custom overlay. For starters, there’s no way of accessing your recent apps – long-pressing on the home button locks the phone, while a double-tap opens the camera. Due to its lack of capacitive buttons, the phone’s multitasking capabilities do feel rather restrained.

Meizu doesn’t preinstall Google Apps – just Meizu’s own default selection of software, which includes a music, camera and email app among others you’d normally expect with a smartphone, and the Meizu App Store and Themes. By running the GMS Installer from the Meizu App Store, however, you can install all of Google’s Framework services: the Play store, Google Maps, Gmail and so on.

Meizu Pro 7 Plus review: Performance

The secondary screen makes the Meizu Pro 7 Plus an unusual phone, but it doesn’t run with the crowd internally either. Instead of a Qualcomm chip, you’ll find one of MediaTek’s higher-end offerings: a deca-core 2.6GHz MT6799 Helio X30. There’s 6GB of RAM, too, providing plenty of headroom for your multitasking needs.

Unfortunately, my go-to benchmarking software, Geekbench 4, refused to run on the Meizu Pro 7 Plus so I was left with AnTuTu benchmark instead. Here, the phone performed admirably, with a score of 116,733, which in plain English means it’ll fly through anything you throw at it. However, it does sit behind the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus, which manages a score of 173,540.

The Meizu Pro 7 Plus is also outpaced by impressive OnePlus 5, which achieves a similar score of 170,666.

^Meizu Pro 7 Plus review: GFXBench Manhattan 3

Despite the quick CPU, I was disappointed by its graphics power, served up here by a PowerVR 7XTP GPU. In the GFXBench Manhattan 3 test, it struggled to keep up.

^Meizu Pro 7 Plus review: Battery life

Similarly, at 12hrs 22mins, its battery life is pretty mediocre and it falls considerably behind other flagship phones, such as the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus, and close rivals such as the OnePlus 5.

I don’t often touch on the internal sound quality, but I feel compelled to do so here. Meizu has opted to use the Cirrus Logic CS43130 audio chip, a brand you might recognise if you’ve read iPhone teardowns, such as this iPhone 7 one on iFixit. Cirrus Logic chips are highly rated in the audiophile community for their neutral sound.

Putting the Meizu Pro 7 Plus up against the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus, which uses an Exynos 8895 SoC, I found the Meizu sounds a lot better, with a wider soundstage, better instrument separation, slightly more forward-sounding mids and an excellent low-end reproduction. All my tests were subjectively conducted through my custom-made P.EAR.S SH-2 earphones.

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Meizu Pro 7 Plus review: Camera

Not content with providing twin screens, the Meizu Pro 7 Plus also has a dual-camera on the rear, one colour, one monochrome. Each is equipped with a 12-megapixel 1/2.9in sensor, an aperture of f/2 and has phase-detection autofocus, although there’s no optical image stabilisation.

Unlike the OnePlus 5 or the iPhone 7, there’s no optical zoom on offer here – the second camera is instead used to create more striking monochrome photos, blurred-background portrait images and to improve quality in low light scenes.

It doesn’t quite compete with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Google Pixel on quality but, still, the level of detail and colour is impressive.

^ Without HDR enabled, the buildings are accurately represented, the dull sky is grey, trees have the right green colour

With HDR enabled, images are visibly sharper, colours are a tad more accurate and the contrast is improved.

^ With HDR enabled, the image is more accurate, detailed brickwork on the red building in the foreground, and trees have a lot better definition

In low-light conditions, the Meizu Pro 7 Plus does an excellent job, especially with “Multi-Frame Low Light Mode” enabled in the camera app settings. This reduces image noise in low light conditions. The results are impressive but it’s outclassed by the Samsung Galaxy S8 and LG G6, which both draw in a lot more light and detail under low-light conditions.

By comparison, the OnePlus 5 suffers from a lack of detail and light with its dual 16-megapixel cameras, which means if you’re taking a lot of low-light images without flash, the Meizu Pro 7 Plus is a better pick.

^ In low light without the option enabled, the wooden figure has image noise in the background

^ In low light with it enabled, there is a massive reduction in image noise, with the wooden figure appearing clearer

Its dual-tone flash does an excellent job in reducing shadows and improving image detail. Colour accuracy, though, is slightly affected by a warm yellow tone.

^ In low light without flash colours are accurate, but image details are somewhat lost

^ In low light with the flash enabled, the shadows around the stuffed bear are eliminated but colour accuracy is affected with over-saturation a yellow-tinge on the plant pot

The Meizu Pro 7 Plus’ front-facing camera captures images at 16 megapixels and has an aperture of f/2. Image quality is excellent, but you may well find yourself using it only for Skype and the like, since using the rear camera is so easy with the secondary screen.

^ The front-facing 16-megapixel selfie camera is excellent

The camera app has several tricks up its sleeve too. Through the camera app, you’ll be able to toggle on/off the secondary display, allowing your subject to see what’s being recorded.

The camera app has a “Dual lens blur” toggle. When activated, this allows you to take photos with a blurred background or foreground. This works better for objects that are close-up, as slight smearing occurs in background-focused images.

^ Dual lens blur with subject focus at the front

^ Dual lens blur with subject focus at the back

There are also plenty of extra photo modes to choose from, such as Panorama, time-lapse, GIF, slow motion, “makeup” and a dedicated monochrome mode. The Pro mode allows manual control over the camera’s exposure, white balance, focus, and ISO among others.

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Meizu Pro 7 Plus review: Verdict

The Meizu Pro 7 Plus isn’t a flagship killer; it’s not trying to replace the likes of the HTC U11 or the Samsung Galaxy S8. Instead, it brings something new to the table, with its clever secondary screen introducing a completely different way of capturing selfies, keeping track of your notifications and so forth.

Okay, so it isn’t as fast as the OnePlus 5 and it isn’t without its problems, either – battery life is mediocre, there’s no storage expansion and it isn’t waterproof. But despite this, there’s something alluring, something enticing about the Meizu Pro 7. If you’re bored of me-too smartphones, it’s well worth considering.