Given that many people – myself included – don’t seem to have quite gotten over the anti-consumer move of phone companies ditching the 3.5mm headphone jack, an upcoming smartphone from Meizu is certainly daring. The Meizu Zero justifies its name by having absolutely zero ports to speak of. That means it has no buttons, no ports and no holes. No gaps at all, in fact. How do you charge it? Wirelessly. How do you pop a SIM card in? You don’t – it will use a virtual eSIM like the cellular versions of the Apple Watch 4 . But surely there are holes for a speaker grille? Nope. Using something called mSound 2.0, the Meizu Zero allows the screen to function like a speaker, apparently – though we can’t imagine it would be any competition for a Bluetooth speaker if you want to do anything but make calls and listen to podcasts. READ NEXT: Best Chinese smartphones
It doesn’t even have physical buttons, leaving just a “virtual side button”. As you’d expect for a handset without holes, it’ll have an IP68 rating – it would be a bit of a letdown if it died at the first sign of water, after all.
Other specifications are very strong on paper. Like almost every other flagship smartphone running Android, it’s powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor. The screen is a UHD AMOLED affair, measuring at 5.99in, and it has a fingerprint scanner embedded within. The wireless charging – which you are, of course, dependent on – goes at a fast 18W. Though good luck finding a charger if you’re out and about, and your phone goes flat. That might never be an issue here in the UK, of course. Meizu doesn’t really have a presence over here, and it’s highly probable that this launch will be limited to China, but we’ll update you when we know for sure. A more interesting question, perhaps, is whether other phone manufacturers will follow suit with their own portless designs or not...
