Meizu is doing a great job in terms of launching affordable smartphones in every category. The company has already launched one of the cheapest Snapdragon 845-powered phone in China, the Meizu 16 and also the cheapest Snapdragon 710-powered phone, the Meizu X8. Today, the company unveiled the Meizu Note 8. It is an affordable budget smartphone that features Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 632, a chipset we haven’t seen in a lot of phones launched this year.
The phone doesn’t have any unique design since it is a budget phone. There is a unibody metal build which is a big thumbs up. The phone has dual cameras on the rear and below them is the fingerprint scanner. The company kept the design on the rear similar to the Meizu X8, so that’s good since we don’t have any iPhone-like vertical dual camera setup that we see on most of the budget Android phones.
On the front, there is an 18:9 display, so it is good to see Meizu not going for notch design for all its phones (X8 is an exception). The display is a 6-inch Full-HD+ LCD panel with a resolution of 2160 x 1080 pixels and a maximum brightness of 450 nits. The contrast ratio if 1500:1, which is normal in budget phones.
Under the hood, there is an octa-core 14nm 1.8GHz Snapdragon 632 processor with the Adreno 506 GPU. The Meizu Note 8 comes in a single variant with 4GB RAM and 64GB internal storage. On the rear, the phone has a primary 12MP f/1.9 Sony IMX362 sensor with 1.4μm Pixels and a secondary 5MP camera for depth information. The camera can, therefore, shoot Portrait photos. On the front, the Note 8 has an 8MP camera with f/2.0 aperture and AI Face Unlock.
The Meizu Note 8 packs a 3,600mAh battery underneath and charges via the micro USB port present on the bottom. It would’ve been great if the phone had a USB Type-C port, but sadly, it doesn’t have one. The phone does support 18W Fast Charging which is a good thing. Android Oreo runs out of the box with Flyme OS on top.
The Note 8 comes in Black, Blue, Red & Purple colors. The price is 1298 Yuan which means the phone cost just $185. As always, we don’t expect the phone to launch globally as same is the story with almost all the Meizu phones. But if the company launches it globally at this price, it could be a great budget phone.