Customer Reviews

MEIZU MP4 Portable Video & Music Player 4GB (White)

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I own the 8gb version, had it now for a week. In my collection is the venerable iRiver iHP-140, the iPod 4th generation, iPod 2gb Nano, and I've played around with the Archos 504 80gb and the Iubi Blue.

I decided what I needed was a large-capacity player, for which I don't have a solution yet: the Archos 160gb fits the bill in terms of size, but doesn't support the formats I like (OGG, Flac). The Iubi Blue is fantastic, but is limited by its size (60gb - although I hear there is a 100gb version of something - the s60 maybe - coming soon). The search continues.

But my search for a second, lighter, flash-based player that I could wear while jogging, using an arm-band, that had good sound and that supported the audio formats I wanted, has ended! I'm slightly surprised and happy to say that the Meizu M6 is fantastic in almost every way:

1. Many formats supported
2. Video, though I don't plan on using it much, is surprisingly crisp and easy on the eyes (read that encoding to an acceptable format requires a little bit of tweaking and patience the first time around until you get the hang of it)
3. Good UI with easy-to-operate controls: the touchpad was the right level of sensitivity and I could manipulate it easily while driving. You can also choose what appears on your main menu, if you like it less cluttered
4. Excellent battery life: I haven't charged it in a week, other than connecting it a few times for a few minutes to transfer some additional content (read that others are getting close to the rated 24 hours for audio)
5. Light, but solid: doesn't feel cheap, looks like it could withstand a few drops. With a player of this size, you're bound to drop it at some point, so that's helpful
6. Works seamlessly with MediaMonkey and Windows Media Player, haven't tried it yet with Winamp or MusicMatch, sure it works fine. You can also manage it like a hard drive and update the music library manually if you prefer
7. Records only at 128kbps, 64kbps, or 32kbps in MP3, which is more than adequate for voice, but if I wanted to record concerts and such, I'd probably use my iRiver iHP-140. At 128kbps, you get roughly 2 hours of recording time with 8gb and obviously less with the 4gb and 2gb versions
8. Customizable backgrounds, skins, etc. I really like the highly customizable Rockbox interface for my iHP-140, so being able to natively customize the Meizu M6 is a plus

That's all I can think of right now in terms of features and usability. For those of you who care, there is definitely an envy factor involved, too, as I've been asked what it was and where it could be purchased.

I have had the Meizu M6 for about a month now. I am highly impressed. My girlfriend has the Sansa e270 which I liked very much, and originally planned to get the e280 for myself. However I read the reviews on the internet for the M6 and it sounded very interesting so I gave it a try.
*The Meizu is very easy to use, the menu is clear and logical. It is also very customizable. The touch-pad is pretty intuitive.
*You can drag and drop files onto the M6 as if it was an external storage device, very easy.
*It can be charged via any USB port, or you can buy one of those wall-plug to USB adapters to charge it. The battery life is amazing, definitely over 20 hours.
*My player came with firmware version 1.00.x and I immediately went to Meizu's website and installed the current 2.00.x firmware. Also very easy to do.
*The display is very nice (I have the "S" version) and pictures look great on it. You can even use GIF's. I made my own backgrounds in Photoshop since you can make any picture on the player as your "desktop" background.
*The FM tuner is the best yet that I have had on a CD/MP3 player. You can actually listen to radio without it fading in and out. I wish it had AM...
*The sound quality is truly amazing. Many, many sound options, including customizable equalizer, phase corrected equalizer, spatializer (with virtual 3D), bass boost, treble boost and ViBE. Low's are strong and don't distort. I don't think I have ever had a portable music playing device which sounded this good.
*I have not tried to convert and/or play video on the M6 yet, so I cannot comment on that function.
*The earphones which come with the player are better than average of what you usually get, but I don't like the fact that the wires are of a sticky rubber material. They get tangled easily and also tend to stick to things and pull when you wear them.
*One thing that bothers me is that all the accesories are sold by stores which only accept Paypal. I would really like a case for my M6 but have not found a store which accepts credit card.
*All in all I really enjoy this player. I think it's the best bang for the buck out there right now. I wish I would have bought the 8GB version, but maybe that's next. I would highly recommend the M6.

This player is slightly smaller than a credit card, and before receiving it was a bit worried that the screen would be too small, however the screen is very clear and bright and am very happy with the display.
The player had sensitive navigation to start with but after downloading and installing the latest firmware I have encountered no problems with the touchpad.

I would like to address a few concerns that Central New Yorker "Skier", a previous reviewer has raised...

> The user interface is awful

Actually the interface is very simple with many easily accessible features. Users can choose their own wallpapers for music playback, menu, etc. and the background can be reset if the colors clash with the text.

>there are some very basic features like fast forward and volume control that are badly implemented in the design

I regard this as misreporting. This reviewer most probably hasn't even used a Meizu miniplayer. The sound control works by sliding your finger up or down the touchpad. One fast forwards by pressing forward - if you want to go to a specific place in a tune, one only needs to tap the menu button to popup an icon on the displayed progress bar. Sliding your finger up or down on the tocuhpad moves the icon to anywhere you want in the tune or audiobook.

>If you listen to audio books this is not the product for you.

With the method above you can navigate to where you want. Bookmarks may be a feature that is added shortly. Meizu do listen to their users and may release a firmware that addresses this point.

>It has a tendency to restart the book from the beginning

Not so. The player resumes to the correct place, unless you are re-opening the file after playing other files.

Things I like...
Long lasting battery.
Nice resume function.
Extremely fast video conversion software.
Flexible player setup.
Superb audio quality - the best I've heard
Durable design.
Clear radio reception.

Highly Recommended!

This is my fourth and best MP3 player. I had an old Archos hard drive dinosaur, a Creative hard-disk player, and a SanDisk flash drive. Both hard drives broke as a result of falls. I read the reviews of the Meizu starting last summer and bought the SanDisk until I could get my hands on the 4GB Meizu M6.

It's been worth the wait. The product has excellent performance and is beautiful. The sound reproduction is great, with lots of choices to suit my particular preferences. It's got better bass than anything else that I've tried. The video quality is great. The FM radio is quite good, but the sound doesn't match up to what I get on the device from my MP3 collection. I haven't tried the Meizu earphones, since I have my own Etymotics.

I also haven't tried the microphone or recording off the radio. I have upgraded the software, which was pretty uneventful. Battery life if great. I haven't been able to run down the battery in the two days that I've had the player.

The video picture quality is quite good. The video conversion program is pretty slow and the relatively low fps means that the voices don't quite correspond to the faces. I took some home movies with my point-and-shoot Panasonic Lumix camera and the result, after conversion, was more than acceptable.

The Meizu Me site is useful for tools to re-skin the player and other useful links.Some people on the Meizu Me support site recommended the Badak converter. I tried it and the result was a file that was about half the size of Meizu's converter with OK quality.

I had one minor gripe: It took me a while to figure out how to fast forward within a file. One click while playing a file brings up a rectangular icon, which allows you to fast forward. Subsequent pressing of the play button brings up things like a sound display.

Less than a gripe is the user guide, which is quite comprehensive and well organized but reads like it's been machine-translated from Chinese.

How does it compare to the iPod? It's got an FM radio and a recorder. The touch-pad format -- vertical, as opposed to iPod's circular -- means that there's room for a larger screen in a device that's smaller than a credit card. It has tons of open codecs, so you're not locked in to Apple's AAC encryption and to iTunes. The UI is a little inconsistent between applications, but it's not terribly difficult to figure out. The Meizu's touch pad sensitivity is not adjustable -- something that Creative's figured out.

I'm not sure about the price difference. My guess is that the Meizu is cheaper. And it's going to get a lot cheaper. There's been a collapse in flash memory prices, and Meizu's lowered their price in China, so prices should drop here as well. Everyone's prices should come down.

One of the problems that Meizu had -- the reason that I had to wait for so long for my player to become available -- is that they had trouble finding a US distributor. They've got one now with Dane-Elec, a French company with a CA office. I also read somewhere that they had some trouble with licensing, so that may be the reason.

Final point. I bought my Meizu player from Jarmarc. He sells on eBay, through Amazon and directly from his own site. I believe that the deal is slightly better from Amazon. However you buy from him, he's great and reliable.

i just got back from china where I picked up a white, 4gb M6 for about $90 in beijing. it really does live up to the hype.

Pros:
- long battery life (they claim 20 for audio and 5 for video...i haven't had it die on me yet)
- great sound, with my Shure e2c headphones i hardly ever need to put it above 10 volume ticks out of a possible 40
- beautiful screen...i don't have a figure for brightness, but this is probably the best-looking screen i have seen on a player at this price point (you can get it from amazon for about $150, or much cheaper if you find yourself in china)
- allows you to navigate by id3 tag info or file folders
- does not require software to sync with a computer, but will work with songbird, winamp, etc. as an MSC or UTM device
- reads text files
-

Cons:
- must convert all video before transferring to device. in my experience so far, it converts at about 3x realtime (so an hour-long video takes 20 minutes).
- doesn't convert all videos well (all .avi files seem to work fine, but it has issues with .wmv)
- doesn't resume well. this may be a minor gripe for most people, but if you find yourself watching a long movie or listening to an audiobook, it can be frustrating to lose your place when you power down.

Overall:
- if you are lucky enough to find one of these in stock, buy it. the M6 is hands-down the most versatile music player of its capacity and price on the market, and probably will remain that way until meizu releases the upgraded version later this year.

I've had the Meizu for about a month now, and I like it fine so far. I bought it to replace an iAudio G3 that couldn't stay out of the repair shop.

The sound quality is good, but there are a bunch of audio controls to play around with to get the sound the way you want it. The battery life seems good too - around 12 to 15 albums worth of life I would guess.

There are a lot of features to this unit. Some of which I probably will never use. The video feature is one. The Meizu comes with a little commercial preloaded, and I played it just to see how the unit works. The picture is bright and sharp. It also has picture storage and some stuff like a calculator and some games. I can't see me ever wanting to use them though.

The FM Tuner is pretty good. You can turn on and off the stereo reception, which is great for listening to stations where the signal is not strong enough to sustain a stable stereo signal.

The one drawback to the the Meizu 4GB (and one that someone else mentioned too) is that control pad is a bit too sensitive. Scrolling up and down can be frustrating when you keep blowing right on by the selection you want. Perhaps there will be a firmware upgrade at some point to fix that.

The one feature that I would like and the Meizu doesn't seem to have is a "Auto play next" type of thing. The iAudio G3 I had could be set so that when one album was finished, the player would just continue with the next album. The Meizu will just stop at the end of an album and you have to navigate back the main menu and select another album.
Most people wouldn't care about this, since they just use the player to play single songs - like we used to do with 45rpm records - throw on a stack of 45s and you were happy. But I tend to use the player to listen to whole albums, so the feature I've mentioned would be great.

All that said, the main reason I traded away from the iAudio was for dependability and durability. The Meizu seems solidly built where the iAudio felt a bit flimsy. Thanks to the dog, the Meizu has hit the floor a couple of times now, and hasn't skipped a beat. But - the iAudio lasted 6 months before the onslaught of problems began. This Meizu is only a month old, so we'll see.

So far so good.

-- Follow up -- October 2009
The Meizu has been very dependable for these past two years. Durable, sturdy and still sounds great. Again, thanks to the dog, the Meizu has been yanked out my pocket and bounced off the pavement several times. Never phased it.

My only real complaint after two years, is the overly sensitive touchpad.

I presume that Meizu doesn't make this model anymore, so I'm just adding this addendum for posterity's sake.

Just some comments from a newbie. hope helpful for those like me, never used media player before.

1. sound quality best ever seen, much better than ipod, creative, which i've owned.
2. plays movie greatly. lovely lcd display. i enjoyed 3 movies during a trip. very cool.
3. amazingly looong battery life. 36 hours? whatever, it's more than enough for me.
4. displays lyrics for mp3.
5. play subtitles for movie.
6. eBook function. read .txt ebooks anywhere!
7. photo album. beautiful displays.
8. the converter software on the CD is very strong. able to convert .rmvb files. so far able to play any movie that is stored on my computer.
9. FM radio recording & voice recording.
10. touchboard works very comfortable.

Just go my M6 a week ago. some opinions of a newbie.. still exploring more features.

The Meizu Miniplayer is very good all round. I have used it connected to speakers as well as an FM transmitter in the car for playing audio files. The battery life has been good, about 15 hours. The sound is very good with a tendency to have more bass as the volume of the player is turned up. With the FM transmitter I am using, if the volume on the player is too high, some songs will get clipped or compressed at times, making a static sound. I have restricted the volume to 37 out of 40 and that mostly fixes it for me.

The controls are sensitive but easy to use, although they are too sensitive to try to use while driving. It is easy to connect and copy files from the computer by simply dragging and dropping. If you connect the player while turned off it will only charge, so it needs to be on before connecting if you wish to move files.

The video and picture quality is very good and the video converter software is easy to use to compress and turn the video to fit the screen. The video converter software also works well under Linux using Ubuntu 7.10 and Wine 0.9.46.

I like the product very much and recommend it as well.

Features/Cons:
High in performance,
Slick design, light weight,
Nice quality of the product,
Very good display,
Long battery life,
Quality of headphone and other stuff is excellent.
Controls are very good,
Menu options and navigations is very good.
Audio Recording Quality is also sensitive and good.

Improvement needed:-
1) FM does not work outside the US - I assume it has not got a dual frequency mode FM - however, when you are out of country, least you like listening FM but more the stored songs and for this MP3 player quality is excellent.
2) Battery charging does not show the actual charged level. This causes me to check player's screen every time before removing, has it been charged? As it shows charged fully at the end only.
3) There is no facility to search a particular song. So, if you have around 900 songs loaded, to listen a particular song, you need to browse through a whole list! I am not sure if this feature is available in other brands. But it really helps in case a long list of songs and where browsing of songs in not that easy like in this set.
4) Manual print quality is cheap, descriptions of the instructions is also not good.

Problem:
1) Viewing a photo is slow, get very slow, even system gets hang, when you load a high resolution photos like of 7 mega pixels or higher or movie. This behaves similar even when you are browsing the photos-because it shows thumb nails of the loaded photo.

Overall an excellent audio player but the video player is average.

Nice product at a reasonable price. No headaches, no mess or hassle with annoying software and no freezing up and constant resetting like other more expensive players that I have purchased in the past. All you do is plug it into your computer, drag and drop the music you want and listen. it is as simple as that. i myself love technology and am very literate when it comes to electronics and computer technology, but the no-hassle, no mess attitude that this player has is very intriguing. People who can't figure out certain electronics and other technology easily won't have to worry about that with this product.