Forbe's view on Flyme OS

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2016-08-05 12:45

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Guys check it out what forbes review on our flyme OS

http://www.forbes.com/sites/bens ... le-os/#28441a1665b2

 

Full article:

"If there’s anything I learned this year from reading a bunch of phone reviews and also reviewing my fair share of phones, it’s that it’s no longer necessary to go on and on about how a phone looks or gush about its “premium” metal unibody. Look, I get it, gadget geeks love sleek metal gadgets (and most tech reviewers are geeks at heart) so we want to drop hundreds of words raving about them. But this isn’t 2013, when a tightly-constructed metal unibody device was still a rarity in the Android world. In 2016, every phone has a metal unibody, and they’re all well-built.

Every review out on the web raved about the HTC 10′s build — and it is awesome — but you know what other phones have the same build quality and feel in hand? Chinese phones that cost half as much. Every phone feels the same now. I don’t care if it’s the latest US$700 iPhones and Samsungs, or $500 LGs or $300 Chinese phones, they are all superbly-crafted metal devices that feel very sturdy and solid in the hand.
 
The Meizu MX 6.

So let’s focus on other things instead, like how a phone handles real-life usage scenarios. Does the camera launch fast? Is there a shortcut quick action to launch it? Does it do well in low-light? Is the software easy to use? Are there customization options?

These, to me, have always been far more important than how a phone looks and feels. This is why I gave the HTC 10 a mediocre rating. So what if the phone is well-built if HTC failed to let you customize home buttons, or provide an easier way to bring down the notification shade without pulling from the top of the screen (other phones give you shortcuts to do that, in the form of a soft button or other methods).

And that’s also why I gave the OnePlus 3 a glowing review. I loved that it let you customize hardware buttons (you can swap the order of the “back” and “recent apps” buttons, as well as assign shortcut actions that are activated via long-press or double taps). These are important things that drastically improve day to day usage of a phone. On my OnePlus 3 right now, I’ve customized it so that when I long-press the back button, it opens up my last-used app. It’s a very useful shortcut for jumping back and forth between apps. Why doesn’t the HTC 10 or Samsung Galaxy S7 let you customize its hardware buttons?

It sounds minor, but these things are what determines whether a phone is a joy to use or a chore. They all add up.

I’ve been testing two Meizu phones the past few days, including the recently announced, cheap-as-hell (US$300 bucks) MX 6 (and yes, it’s a metal phone that’s just as well-built as the US$700 HTC 10), and man, Meizu’s software has really won me over.

This sounds pretty crazy, right? A Chinese phone’s software is good? But it’s true. Unlike Gionee’s OS or Xiaomi’s MIUI or Huawei’s EMUI — which are all bloated iOS ripoffs — Meizu’s Flyme software is clean looking and easy to use.

The biggest difference of Meizu’s phones is that the Guangdong company does away with Android’s traditional three button layout — “back,” “home” and “recent app,” Instead, there’s just one button on the phone (which also doubles as a fingerprint sensor). Pressing on the button is, as you’d guess, like pressing the home button on the iPhone or Android phones. To go back, you simply tap the same button (not press into it, but tap it). And to open recent apps, you swipe up from the bottom of the screen.


It takes a little bit of time to get used to, but once you do – its simplicity is pretty brilliant, In fact, after using this, going back on the iPhone’s mono-function home button felt like going back in time. Like, “what the hell is this primitive s***?”

Now, is this single-button setup better than Android’s three button layout? I’m not sure yet. I don’t have any problems with the row of triangle/circle/square on most Android phones, but I must say, Meizu’s setup feels bit more intuitive, and more ahead of the times.

Now, another Meizu software feature I love: shortcut actions via gestures. Essentially, it lets you directly launch apps from the phone’s sleeping state, without having to wake the screen, unlock the phone, and then tap into the app. OnePlus’ Oxygen OS has been offering that for years, but Meizu one upped its fellow Chinese rival by offering more gestures that are all fully customizable. For example, I’ve set my MX 6 so that anytime I draw an O on the screen, it launches the camera. If you want, you can set it so the same action launch Facebook. Similarly, you can launch, say, Google Maps by drawing an M, or make it launch Instagram, or voice recorder, whatever.


Meizu’s Flyme also has a superior take on the “floating virtual button” thing that can be found on the iPhone (Apple calls it Assistive Touch) and some other phones. Whereas Assistive Touch only offers very basic functions — it basically doubles as a digital home button — Meizu’s version, which the company dubbed SmarTouch, is a virtual joystick that brings more functionality.
 
Credit: Meizu

You can tap, hold, or double tap the button, and you can press on it like an oldschool Nintendo d-pad (up, down, left, right). You can, of course, assign specific action to each press. With this, you can quickly swap back and forth between apps, or bring down the notification shade, etc.
Other smartphone companies have added little tricks and gestures to its phones before, but few have ever been this useful, and some (like earlier LG phones and all Samsung phones) come with ugly software skins. Meizu’s Flyme is relatively clean and light looking, and brings so much more to the table. Its single-button setup is so simplistic, yet functional, that it almost seems like it should come from Apple."