The phone will be available for Chinese developers

May 17, 2015 13:56 GMT  ·  By

Meizu has finally announced Ubuntu MX4, the first phone from this company with Canonical's operating system. It's aimed at developers from China, but it should land in Europe soon as well.

Meizu has been teasing the Ubuntu MX4 phone for a while now, and we've already seen it, in passing, at a couple of events, but the company has finally made it available. Surprisingly, it's not exactly what everyone was expecting, but as Mark Shuttleworth was saying just last week, it was more than initially revealed.

This is not the first Ubuntu phone out there. BQ has also released the Aquaris e4.5 Ubuntu Edition, but it's very different hardware, and it's in another price range. The Aquaris might be considered a mid-range phone, but MX4 is a high-end device. The regular Meizu MX4 made its debut in September 2014, so it's not all that old.

Meizu Ubuntu MX4 to be available in China, for the time being

The fact that Ubuntu MX4 is available only in China is not a pleasant surprise, especially since we had information on good authority that it would be an international launch, whatever that means. Meizu might have meant that it plans to make it available on other markets, but at a later date.

Ubuntu fans will notice that the interface is completely in Chinese and that there are already a large number of specific scopes available, which means that they have been working on this edition for a long time.

"Meizu is one of the most popular high-end smartphone brands in China, recognized for its innovative and elegant product design and for pioneering the user centric distribution model that has become the standard for several Chinese manufacturers. A number of Chinese scopes are already available from the Ubuntu store including Baidu, Dianping, Weibo, Youku, Sohu and Chinese versions of the Today, Nearby and News aggregation scopes. Web apps are also available for Tmall, Taobao and QQ among others, and Sogou is working on bringing their popular Chinese input method to Ubuntu phones," reads the announcement from Canonical.

Meizu Ubuntu MX4 has a 5.3-inch IPS display (1152 x 1920 resolution), it's powered by the MediaTek MT6595 chipset, a quad-core 2.2 GHz Cortex A17 processor and a quad-core 1.7 GHz A7 processor that can work in tandem in specific situations (technically an octa-core), and Corning Gorilla Glass 3, and a 20.7-megapixel back camera (2MP on the front one).

The phone is priced ¥1799 ($280), but it's likely more with shipping. Please check the official website for more details about availability, prices, and shipping.

Chinese scopes
Chinese scopes

Photo Gallery (2 Images)

Ubuntu MX4
Chinese scopes
Open gallery