Meizu 16Xs review: light and thin, long battery life + wide-angle triple camera, defending the last dignity of the thousand-yuan phone market

This year can be said to be the year of close combat for thousand-yuan phones. Many brands have launched extremely lethal thousand-yuan phones, including Redmi Note7 in the front, Realme X in the back, and OPPO K3 halfway through. It can be said that each brand has its own tricks and strengths.

In this market of thousand-yuan phones, which has almost become a bloodbath, Meizu released its first triple-camera phone, the Meizu 16Xs, and joined the battle. This phone, which focuses on lightness and triple-camera photography, has a 4000 mAh battery in an 8.2mm body without any pressure, and weighs only 165g. The triple-camera missing on the flagship 16s is also made up on the 16Xs. So, can this lightness + triple-camera 16Xs defend Meizu's dignity in the thousand-yuan phone market while resisting strong enemies? Let's take a look.

165g&8.2mm

The front of the Meizu 16Xs has an extreme edge full screen in the same vein as the 16 series. It uses a 6.2-inch Samsung AMOLED screen with a resolution of FHD+ and a screen-to-body ratio of 90%. The clarity and fineness are both at the current mainstream level. It is a pity that the screen itself does not support HDR display. However, the front design of the Meizu 16Xs is simple and beautiful. The upper and lower borders adopt a symmetrical design, and the left and right borders are also narrower than those of mobile phones of the same price. The overall look and feel is much more comfortable than the water drop screen and bangs screen.

This time, the Meizu 16Xs uses under-screen fingerprint recognition, which has a good recognition speed. After getting used to it, you can basically open it with one click. However, compared with the under-screen fingerprint of other brands of mobile phones, the speed of Meizu 16Xs feels a little slower. After many tests, I found that this is actually an illusion. The fingerprint recognition speed of Meizu 16Xs is not slow. It is more that the system animation drags down the overall user experience. I hope that the upcoming Flyme 8 can improve the user experience of fingerprint animation.

165g and 8.2mm are the highlights of Meizu 16Xs. Among the mobile phones with 4000 mAh large batteries, it is considered to be slender. But the price of such a thin and light body is that the back cover and the middle frame are made of plexiglass, which is plastic in layman's terms. But the overall feel is good, the edge treatment is relatively delicate, and the curve of the back cover is also more in line with the palm, and it does not feel cheap at all.

The only minor flaw is that the SIM card slot is a bit uneven. Since there is no protective case included, the protrusion of the card slot is easy to feel during the naked use in the past few days. I hope that subsequent process improvements can improve this situation.

Meizu's first triple rear camera

The 16Xs is the first Meizu phone equipped with three cameras. The main camera is 48 megapixels, Samsung customized GM1 sensor, and the main camera aperture is F1.7; the secondary camera is a combination of ultra-wide angle and depth of field. The ultra-wide angle end is an 8-megapixel sensor with an aperture of F2.2, equivalent to 13mm 118.8° ultra-wide angle, and supports autofocus, the closest focusing distance is 2.5cm, and there is anti-distortion correction; the depth of field lens is 5 megapixels, which is used to record mental information in portrait mode. According to actual tests, it can still perform normal portrait blur shooting when the depth of field lens is blocked, and the effect is not bad.

In general, the triple camera of Meizu 16Xs is worth the money. Although the 5-megapixel depth-of-field lens is a bit useless and seems to be just for the sake of numbers, there are many such practices in the entire mobile phone industry, so we are not surprised by Meizu's approach. Whether it is dual, triple or quad cameras, what matters in the end is the final result. Let's take a look at the sample photos below to see how it is.

The daytime samples of Meizu 16Xs have corresponding color adjustments in most scenes because it is equipped with AI scene recognition, but the overall style tends to be bright. Whether it looks good or not is a matter of personal opinion. If you don’t like it, you can turn off AI scene recognition in the settings.

As Meizu's second phone to use the GM1 sensor, the white balance and focus have not failed in the tests over the past few days, and most of the resulting photos are good. However, in a few bright scenes, the main camera and ultra-wide-angle camera will show their flaws in high-frequency details, with obvious purple fringing and obvious algorithm errors.

48MP main camera

8MP ultra-wide-angle

The ultra-wide-angle lens equipped with the Meizu 16Xs can take 118° ultra-wide-angle photos, which is very practical in scenes such as group photos and meals. The white balance and distortion are well controlled, and it is very practical.

Main camera

Ultra wide angle

Meizu 16Xs also has a hidden feature called super macro. The minimum focusing distance of this lens is only 2.5cm, so when taking pictures, you can get closer and many detailed textures can be captured.

When it comes to night scenes, Meizu 16Xs supports super night scene, but unlike the super night scene we are familiar with, when Meizu 16Xs presses the shutter, you only need to wait for half a second to take a picture. This is not a handheld long exposure method, but the use of multi-frame HDR to make super night scene.

Normal mode

Super Night View

From the sample photos, we can see that the super night scene of Meizu 16Xs is not much different from the normal mode. At most, the highlights are suppressed, and the details in the dark parts are still missing. There are even very exaggerated picture smearing. Compared with the normal mode, the details and textures are almost all smeared out, which can be called an "oil painting night scene". I don't know if this is a software problem of Meizu or its own algorithm problem, but based on the effect of this super night scene, we still do not recommend that you use this function.

Super Night View

Super Night Scene-Tripod Mode

The Super Night Scene also provides a tripod mode, which is an unexpected surprise. It not only uses a long exposure method to record, but also has excellent picture resolution and noise control. Not only the details in the dark areas come out, but the highlights are also suppressed. The final effect is very good. Friends who like to tinker with mobile phone photography can try it out and take good photos.

Performance, just enough

The Meizu 16Xs is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 processor, which adopts an octa-core architecture with an 11nm process technology. The CPU uses Kryo 460, two large cores and six small cores. The maximum frequency of the large core is 2.0GHz, and its performance is stronger than that of the Snapdragon 710. The GPU uses Adreno 612, which is slightly weaker than 710 and 670, but some regular Peace Elite and Honor of Kings can be played; AnTuTu's running score is steadily over 180,000. From the overall performance point of view, it is no problem to be a main machine.

In the game Honor of Kings, we chose to test it with all special effects on high. The Meizu 16Xs can also maintain 58 frames throughout the whole process, which is consistent with the official 58.6 frames. During the game, you will not feel any lag at all. It is estimated that Meizu has spent a lot of time on tuning.

King of Glory highest quality

Peace Elite highest quality

Compared with the smoothness of "Honor of Kings", the highest picture quality of "Game for Peace" can only be set to HD, and the frame rate can only be locked to 30 frames. The average frame rate of the whole process can reach 29 frames. Although the frame rate fluctuation is not large during the whole game, it is still quite painful to play because the frame rate is locked to 30 in HD picture quality. If you want to run Game for Peace more smoothly, you can only use low picture quality in exchange for high frame rate. For a thousand-yuan phone, this is indeed the normal performance level, and you can't expect it to perform like a flagship phone.

During the game, the heat generation of the Meizu 16Xs is much better than expected. The whole machine heats up evenly, and there is no one place that is very hot. After the game, the cooling speed is also relatively fast. However, it is worth mentioning that the screen heats up much more than the back of the Meizu 16Xs. If you play for a long time, your fingers will suffer.

16Xs is both light and long-lasting

The Meizu 16Xs is equipped with a 4000mAh large battery and comes with an 18W fast charging system. In addition to its own PE protocol, it also supports PD and QC protocols after actual testing. The Meizu 16Xs is quite sincere in terms of fast charging compatibility. Even after a day of heavy use, it can still have 37% of remaining power, and the screen-on time is nearly 6 hours. The average power consumption of playing "Honor of Kings" and "Peace Elite" can be less than 10%, which means that the battery of the 16Xs can definitely withstand playing 8 or 9 games in a row.

Summarize:

With Redmi in front and Realme in the back, the market of thousand-yuan phones is fiercely competitive, with super-configuration emerging one after another. The price of lifting camera, Snapdragon 710, under-screen fingerprint, Sony IMX586 have all been reduced to 1,500 yuan or lower. Faced with such fierce market competition, Meizu still maintains its indifferent attitude, focusing on differentiated designs such as thinness, long battery life and extreme full screen. It has absolute recognition at the price of 1,500 yuan, and has its own unique features in the fierce configuration fire of a large number of competitors, successfully defending the last dignity of the thousand-yuan phone market - blindly stacking configurations for thousand-yuan phones is not the long-term development of the industry. The ingenious and unique design that meets the urgent needs of users is the original appearance of thousand-yuan phones.

Finally, it should be pointed out that the product positioning of Meizu 16Xs slightly overlaps with 16X. For the majority of users, it is easy to make a difficult choice when purchasing. It is hoped that in the next generation of product segmentation, Meizu can give a clearer positioning for the product to facilitate user selection.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.