Nope, that’s not an iPhone in that photo.
Meizu’s Pro 6 is very slightly different, just enough that Apple’s lawyers aren’t wading in with cease and desist letters.
In fact, Apple fans might find it a bitter pill to swallow, but the Chinese company has actually managed to go one better than the iPhone 6s in terms of design.
Some incredibly minimised antenna lines are a lot more subtle than the iPhone’s blatant bars, so you aren’t distracted from the metal unibody build.
Throw in a fingerprint sensor that takes 0.2 seconds to recognise your digits, and a 5.2in, 1080p AMOLED screen with a pressure-sensitive 3D Press layer, and it might be enough to make anyone with an iPhone 6s jealous.
Beyond bullying the iPhone 6s into second place in the design stakes, Meizu is also calling the Pro 6 the first deca-core phone on the market. It’s going to land with MediaTek’s 10-core Helio X25, and come paired with 4GB of RAM and either 32GB or 64GB of onboard storage.
Meizu picked one of the best camera sensors around, Sony’s IMX230, and rebuilt the whole lens assembly to make it thinner. It’s even got a 10-LED ring flash, although for some reason it surrounds the laser focus rather than the sensor itself.
The Pro 6 has even managed to bag the same Cirrus logic CS43L36 chip Apple uses in the iPhone, so it should also be up to scratch when it comes to sound.
Expect Android Marshmallow, complete with Meizu’s custom FlyMe skin, twin SIM card slots, and a USB-C slot on the bottom. The bundled charging cable will have extra short circuit and high temperature protection so Meizu’s rapid charging tech won’t fry the phone’s internals.
The battery is the only real weak link: Meizu’s opted for a 2,560mAh cell, while other Chinese phone makers are switching to 3000mAh batteries.
Even so, the Pro 6 is shaping up to be a beast of a phone. If you can get hold of one (there’s no word of a release outside of China) it should set you back an unbelievable R6,550 for the 64GB model.
We can only sit back and hope that Apple’s super sensitive legal team don’t decide to throw a spanner in the works.
