Hands On With the Meizu MX3

LAS VEGAS—Meizu is coming to the U.S. This we know. The high-end Chinese phone maker has an intense cult following in China, where founder Jack Wong has made a career of poking at Apple and Samsung, saying that his products have superior design and features.

The MX3 has been on sale since September in China, so it isn't exactly new, but it hasn't appeared in the U.S. much. This exact model won't come to the U.S., a company rep said, although a better version of it might. The sticking point is that the MX3 is 3G-only, while U.S. carriers require 4G LTE. The company is promising announcements at CES here and at Mobile World Congress in February, which I'm guessing will be a one-two staging of pre-announcing a nonexistent U.S. phone, and then announcing the actual LTE model at MWC. We'll see soon enough.

The MX3 is something to envy, considering it starts at $410 for the 16GB model, $140 less than an iPhone 5c. It feels very tightly built, made of smooth, high-quality plastic with a gently curved back.  There are no physical buttons, and only one virtual button at the bottom; you swipe up from it to wake the phone up into FlyMe, Meizu's very highly stylized Android skin.The 5.1-inch, 1080p display is bright and sharp. I didn't do anything too extensive with the phone, but screens flipped by pretty swiftly on the 8-core Samsung Exynos 5410 processor.

Meizu designs great-looking, decently priced phones. But so much of the brand's success in China is about Jack Wong's charisma and mystique. Huawei and ZTE have both tried to become high-end brands in the U.S. and faltered; they're still kicking around the lower end of U.S. carrier lineups. Xiaomi, Meizu's nemesis, may be coming to the U.S. next year with even cheaper high-end smartphones. Will Meizu deliver not only the product quality but the marketing savvy to crack the U.S., or will it become another Huawei? We'll be getting more updates on this over the next few weeks, to be sure.