Smartphone manufacturers have gradually been removing buttons and ports from their devices. We only get the most essential of buttons on phones these days while many are now ditching the 3.5mm headphone jack. Meizu has come out with a new device which is unlike any seen before. The Meizu Zero is aptly named since it has zero buttons. There isn’t even a port for wired charging.
Meizu says that the Zero doesn’t have any buttons, speaker holes, charging port, and not even a SIM card slot. It appears to be taking the trend to shave things off of the device to its logical conclusion.
This results in a seamless design fashioned out of ceramic. The camera bump does protrude a bit at the back and there are what appear to be microphone holes at the bottom. Nevertheless, Meizu is still advertising this device as the world’s first “holeless phone.”
On the spec front, it has a 5.99 inch OLED display with an in-display fingerprint sensor. There’s a 20 megapixel front camera and a 12+20 megapixel dual camera. The device is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 processor. No information is available as yet about the RAM, storage, and battery.
Since there’s no speaker grill, Meizu’s mSound 2.0 technology enables the screen to double as a speaker. The absence of a charging port means that it relies entirely on wireless charging. Meizu promising wireless charging speeds of up to 18W, nearly double the 9W speeds that Samsung offers.
The company uses a haptic feedback system on the sides to provide virtual buttons in the absense of hardware buttons for volume up/down and power. The eSIM technology eliminates the need for a physical SIM card.
Meizu hasn’t said how much the Zero is going to cost and when it will arrive. One can imagine that these details might be revealed at MWC 2019 next month.