pelvic becki: Meizu MX review

A quick tag search for "Meizu" on Engadget takes us all the way back to April 2006, where we saw the launch of the Chinese company's M6 Mini Player with MP4 playback. But in fact, if you go as far back as early 2003 (before Engadget was even born) you'll also dig up the Meizu MX, which was eventually launched towards the end of the year. Confused? Well, bear with us here: this MX was Meizu's first ever product, a simple 128MB or 256MB MP3 player that unfortunately bore much resemblance to the Cowon iAudio CW300, albeit with different guts. Was this a case of shameless cloning or just an OEM product being rebadged? Our money's on the latter, but only with Monopoly bills.

Skip past the darker times and fast forward to about nine years later, Meizu would launch another MX, but now it's a totally different animal: a 1.4GHz dual-core Android smartphone that can handle a tad more than just music playback. Of course, company founder Jack Wong and his gang aren't the only players on the paddy field, as we also have the similarly powerful Xiaomi Phone already taking the lead in the Chinese Android enthusiast market. Adding more fuel to the fire is that shortly after the Xiaomi Phone's debut, Wong responded to a related forum post by accusing a certain someone -- which is believed to be Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun -- of abusing his or her old position as an angel investor to deviously walk away with Meizu's trade secrets. Alas, we'll probably never know the truth, so we shall simply observe whether the new Meizu MX will bite back hard and good. Read on for our full review on Meizu's second Android handset.

Gallery: Meizu MX review: packaging and hardware