Meizu M1 Note Slated to Arrive in PH for Php7,990

While conversing with the product manager of Novo7 Tech during the local launch of the Meizu MX4 Pro, we were told that they’ll be releasing the Meizu M1 Note in the Philippines soon.

Meizu M1 Note Philippines

For those who are not familiar with the said handset, the Meizu M1 Note is one of the latest additions to the Chinese firm’s portfolio sporting 5.5-inch full-HD IGZO display and runs on an octa-core SoC clocked at 1.7GHz with 2GB of RAM and a non-expandable 16GB storage (32GB model is also available).

Other note-worthy features of this dual-SIM smartphone include LTE connectivity, a 13MP rear camera made by Samsung, Android Kitkat right of the box, as well as sizeable 3,140mAh battery.

Meizu M1 Note specs:
5.5-inch Sharp IGZO Full HD display, 401ppi
Corning Gorilla Glass 3
1.7GHz MediaTek MT6752 octa-core CPU
Mali T760 MP2 GPU
2GB RAM
16GB / 32GB internal storage
13 megapixel Samsung camera w/ LED flash, F/2.2 aperture
1/3.06-inch CMOS sensor, 300-degrees panoramic lens
5 megapixel OVS670 front camera, F/2.0 aperture
Dual-SIM, Dual-Standby
FDD-LTE / WCDMA / GSM
WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n
Bluetooth 4.0, BLE
GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS
Flyme 4 OS (Android 4.4 Kitkat)
3,140mAh battery
150.7 x 75.2 x 8.9mm
145g
White, Blue, Yellow, Green, Pink

According to the folks over at Novo7 Tech, they’re planning to make the Meizu M1 Note available locally in time for the Chinese New Year, with the 16GB variant being sold for Php7,990 – that is if they didn’t encounter any issues with logistics. The worst case scenario is that the handset will be available by March which should give potential buyers enough time to still save up for this competitively-priced smartphone.

RELATED: Meizu M1 Note: 5.5-inch Full HD, LTE, octa-core CPU

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The 105″ LG Curved OLED UHDTV at InnoFest 2015

Last week, we attended the LG InnoFest Asia 2015 in Kota Kinabalu which is an annual roadshow for LG to showcase its new line of smart home appliances and entertainment system. Among the line-up, a huge 105-inch 4K OLED Curved UHDTV took the center stage.

This is the second year that LG is hosting its annual Innofest Asia which is an opportunity for the brand to introduce new products to the regional market (although most of them were shown in CES as far back as 2014). Based on the number of attendees and the 4-day program, the event is mainly tailored for distributors and dealers although a few members of the media from over 10 countries were also invited.

There were a lot of new connected appliances featured this year, but the highlights were focused on new 4K and OLED TVs ranging from 55, 65 and 77 inches with much larger ones going up to 105 inches.

LG is positioning their flagship TVs to sport an OLED display with 4K Ultra HD resolution in either curved or flat display which provides viewers with the best color reproduction, image quality, great contrast and the best viewing experience. We saw the 65-inch Floating Art Slim Curved 4K OLED TV (Model EG9600) which was first showed and won a show award in CES 2015 just last month. The line-up also includes the 77-inch Art Slim Curved 4K OLED TV (77EG9700) and 55-inch Floating Art Slim CURVED 4K OLED TV (55EG9600).

All of LG’s 2015 4K OLED TVs and 4K ULTRA HD TVs feature webOS 2.0, the latest version of LG’s advanced smart TV platform. webOS used to be the mobile operating system from Palm which was bought by HP for their tablets and eventually licensed by LG to be used for its Smart TVs.

LG has also integrated a sophisticated 4K upscaler algorithm into the 4K Ultra HD TV models for smooth rendering of SD, HD and full HD content into near life-like quality images.

Together with the new line-up of TVs, LG also introduced its new Music Flow Series lineup at the roadshow. The lineup includes the new WiFi Sound Bars (Model HS9 and HS7) and the portable WiFi Speaker (Model H4 Portable), which were introduced at CES 2015 in Las Vegas.

The Music Flow series uses LG’s Range-of-Flow technology to automatically stream music from mobile devices. Just bring the device within one foot distance from the speaker, music playing on the device will automatically play on the speaker, removing the necessity of direct NFC tags.

Online music services such as Spotify, Deezer and TuneIn are also supported on the WiFi streaming audio system.

The system also comes with LG HomeChat, a feature which allows the user to control any LG HomeChat devices with a text messaging app on a smartphone or tablet. To use this feature, users merely send a text message to the speaker with simple commands such as “play songs for a party” or “turn off the music after one hour.”

With HomeChat, the LG Music Flow WiFi Series can also act as a personal assistant, setting alarms and alerting users of upcoming events on command.

Other home appliances were also featured, including a new line-up of coreless vacuum cleaners. Comprised of CordZero, CordZero Handstick, CordZero Bedding and Hme-Bot Square, LG’s CordZero line of vacuum cleaners are among the most interesting across all the home appliance line-up outside of TV and AV. Of the lot, the HOM-BOT Square (pronounced as home-bot) is most interesting for its autonomous operation and a futuristic design that resembles a drone or RC toy.

Like most other robot vacuums before it, the Hom-Bot Square works very easily – just set it up and forget it. Once it’s done with its chores, it will victoriously crawl back to its charging port and play a tune. With a price tag of about $800, this is a pretty expensive robot vacuum cleaner.

We’ve seen many other impressive home appliances as well – from dishwashers to water purifiers, washing machines and stylers right up to multi-door refrigerators with double door-in-door features.

However, what really captured a lot of people’s attention is the gigantic 105-inch OLED TV on display.

The LG 105UC9 (104.6-inch diagonal) is by far, the biggest OLED display LG has ever built for a commercially available TV. It was first introduced last year during CES 2014 and reportedly had a price tag of $100,000.

The LG 105UC9 has a display resolution of 5120 x 2160 pixels, technically putting it way over the usual 4k resolution. The set comes with built-in a 7.2 surround sound speaker system designed by Harman/Kardon and a power output of 150 watts.

The TV is also powered by webOS 2.0, which is perhaps the simplest but most intuitive smart TV UI in the market.

LG is now introducing the same model in South East Asia this year, following the availability of the 98-inch OLED TV LG Philippines released in the country just this December 2014. The 98-inch model has a local price of Php1.5 million so we’re not going to be surprised if the 105-inch will fetch close to Php2 million when it arrives here later in the year.

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Meizu MX4 Pro First Impressions

During a mini launch event that took place last Friday, we were able have a first look at Meizu’s latest flagship smartphone – the Meizu MX4 Pro – which was officially launched back in November and was recently made available locally courtesy of Novo7 Tech.

As far as design is concerned, the Chinese firm already had a good thing going with the Meizu MX4 and the company decided to implement the same on their new flagship smartphone which resulted into a near-identical look to its predecessor.

Meizu MX4 Pro Philippines

From the placement of the buttons, down to the shiny silver trims around the edge of the device, the MX4 Pro looks and feels like the MX4. In fact, had it not been for the rimmed rectangular physical button of the MX4 Pro (which by the way is equipped with a fingerprint sensor), it would be really tricky to identify the new one from old when both these handsets are placed side-by-side and viewed at a distance.

Despite the likenesses that the MX4 Pro has with its predecessor in terms of design, the feature set of the former paints an entirely different picture. Apart from the rear camera (which was already top-of-the-line since the MX4), all of the components of the Meizu MX4 Pro have been revamped to match those of other flagship smartphones both from reputable brands and otherwise.

The most evident improvement on the MX4 Pro is on its display. From the 5.36-inch full-HD display of its predecessor, the MX4 Pro now sport a bright and vibrant 5.5-inch 2560 x 1536 IPS One-Glass Solution (OGS) screen made by Sharp, complete with a sheet of Corning Gorilla Glass 3 for extra protection against scratch.

MX4 Pro (Web)

Meizu also decided to give their new flagship smartphone a shot in the arm in the processing department. Instead of a more affordable option from MediaTek, the MX4 Pro is powered by an 8-core Samsung Exynos 5430 Octa which boasts better power efficient which is, in part, thanks to its new 20nm manufacturing process.

The able processor is paired with an Mali-T628 MP6 graphics processing unit that’s clocked at 600Mhz, 3GB worth of LPDDR3 RAM, and sizeable 32GB of internal storage which, unfortunately, is non-expandable.

Needless to say, an impressive benchmark test results is to be expected from this bad boy given its beastly hardware configuration. That’s exactly what we saw when we ran our usual set of benchmark tests during our time with the handset.

Quadrant Standard: 9826
AnTuTu: 45574
Vellamo: 1546 (Metal) / 1252 (Multicore) / 2759 (Browser)

Initial Verdict

People who were expecting a complete design overhaul on the MX4 Pro will be completely disappointed. However, as the old saying goes, don’t fix something that’s not broken. This is, in our opinion, is the reason behind Meizu’s decision to keep the same design on their new flagship device. That being said, users who liked the design of the first model will certainly like the implementation on the new release.

Meizu MX4 Pro Specs:
5.5-inch Sharp IPS Display, 2560 x 1536, 542ppi
Corning Gorilla Glass 3
Samsung Exynos 5430 chipset (Quad-core 2.0GHz Cortex-A15 + Quad-core 1.5GHz Cortex-A7)
Mali-T628 MP6
3GB of RAM
16GB, 32GB, 64GB internal storage; non-expandable
20.7-megapixel rear camera with Sony IMX220 Exmor RS sensor and dual LED flash
5-megapixel front camera
NFC, Wi-Fi 802.11 ac, Bluetooth 4.0, GNSS (GPS, GLONASS, BDS), LTE
mTouch Fingerprint sensor
Retina Sound (Hi-Fi audio, ES9018 and OPA 1612 chips)
Flyme 4.0 OS based on Android 4.4 KitKat
Colors: Gold, Gray, White

The lack of storage expandability option and the company’s proprietary UI will also play a big role in the success of the MX4 Pro in the local scene as some users prefer a more familiar Android experience (which you can do so by installing third-party launchers) and having a Micro-SD card slot. Gripes aside though, the Meizu MX4 Pro should be a should be in a really comfortable spot to go head-to-head with other flagship devices thanks to its impressive feature set and enticing price tag.

The new Meizu MX4 Pro is now available locally and can be had for Php20,990. Novo7 Tech is giving away Php1,000 discount for those who will purchase the handset today. On top of that, the local distributor is also giving away a free Nillkin case/cover for those MX4 users who will be upgrading to the MX4 Pro.

RELATED:
Meizu MX4 Pro Now Official
Meizu MX4 Pro To Hit Local Shelves For Php20,990
Battle of the Pros: Xiaomi Mi Note Pro vs Meizu MX4 Pro

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PowerColor Radeon R9 286 TurboDuo OC Review

Today we’re going to take a closer at PowerColor’s take on the latest addition to AMD’s top-tier graphics card lineup – Radeon R9 285.

Design and Construction

There’s nothing to say about the physique of this graphics card that immediately jumped out to us the moment we took it out of its fairly-straightforward packaging (which by the way doesn’t have anything on it apart from anti-static bubble wrap and a manual).

PowerColor R9 285 Philippines

This doesn’t mean that it looks horrible though. We think that a lot of AMD users will appreciate the Red-on-Black paint job of the card’s robust plastic shroud, complemented by two black 5-bladed fans that keeps things nice and cool for the graphics card (more in that later).

Taking out the plastic shroud reveals a well-designed heat sink with well-spaced fin array for better cooling performance. The responsibility of dissipating the heat away from the GPU is mainly handled by three copper heat pipes that are soldered to a fairly-wide copper base.

PowerColor-Radeon-R9-285-TurboDuo-OC

At the top you’ll see a pair of 6-pin PCIe ports which are required to power this bad boy up, and around the back there are a quartet of display ports; 2 Dual-Link DVI (DVI-I and DVI-D), one DisplayPort and an HDMI out.

There are two usual culprits that are missing on this card; a backplate and CrossFire connector. The latter is understandable since this card will still CrossFire with other supported card through the PCIe x16 slot. The absence of a backplate, however, on the R9 285 TurboDuo is quite disappointing, but it compensates for it (or at least it tries to) with a black PCB, if you’re in to that kind of thing.

Test Bench
AMD A10-7850K @ 4.0GHz
ASUS A88X Gamer Motherboard
8GB G.Skill Ripjaws X 2133Mhz dual-channel DDR3 RAM
256GB ADATA XPG SX900 Solid-State Drive
EVGA 500B 500W PSU
ASUS VX239H 1080p IPS Monitor

Specs

Software used:

Windows 8 64-bit
AMD Catalyst 14.9
Fraps (frame rate measurement)
Open Hardware Monitor (Temp Monitoring)

Performance (Games)

BF4

BioShock

Crysis 3

FarCry 3

GRID

Tomb Raider

With the exclusion of Far Cry 3, the PowerColor Radeon R9 285 TurboDuo managed to give us a respectable 40+fps on all of the popular titles that we’ve ran. Although it struggled to reach that same kind of frame rate on Far Cry 3, above 30fps with little to no compromise on quality is still something to write home about.

Synthetic Benchmarks

Along with measuring what kind of frame rate we can get out of the graphics card, we also ran a few synthetic benchmark tests on it.

Here are the results we got which we placed side-by-side with the scores that we got from the Strix GTX 750Ti:

3DMark 11 (Performance and Extreme)

3DMark FireStrike (Performance and Extreme)

CineBench

3DMark Vantage (Performance and Extreme)

FurMark (1080p and 720p)

Unigine Heaven 4 (Basic and Extreme)

Temperature and Fan Noise

When idle, the temps on the card hovered around the 40 – 45 degree Celsius mark with the fans spinning at 35% of its full capacity. When we fired up FurMark benchmark test, the temps soared at around 70°C and maxed out at 80-degree Celsius with the two fans spinning at little over 4300RPM.

During the test, we got a respectable average frame rate of 45fps, with the lowest one being at 42fps and topped out at 48fps.

R9 285 FurMark 1080p

Noise has never been an issue with this card, even at high temperatures. Despite not having the fancy 0DB fan noise technology found on some cards, the two 5-bladed fans did an awesome job of keeping things nice and cool without generating a lot of noise, or at least nothing cumbersome.

Conclusion

The PowerColor Radeon R9 285 TurboDuo has most, if not all of the things one would want from a mid-range graphics card; it offer’s near-silent cooling solution, quite generous factory overclock and low TDP which will allow user to run this card on a decent 500W PSU like the one we used for this review.

PowerColor Radeon R9 285 TurboDuo OC specs:
Process: 28nm
Architecture: GCN1.2
Stream Processors: 1792
Compute Performance: 3.29 TFLOPS
Engine Clock: 945MHz
VRAM: 2GB DDR5
Memory Clock: 5.5GHz GDDR5
Memory Bus Width: 256-bit
Bandwidth: 176GB/s
TDP: 190W
DirectX 12 support
AMD TrueAudio Technology
Power Connectors: 2x 6-pin
Video ports: 1x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI, 2x Dual-Link DVI

Although you can get still get a pretty decent performance out of this card on 1440p gaming with some minor adjustments and compromises, we feel that this card is best suited for 1080p gaming which is evident on the results we got from our tests.

The PowerColor Radeon R9 285 TurboDuo can be had for a little over Php12,000.

What we liked about it:

  • Minimalist and compact design
  • Commendable factory overclock
  • Near-silent fan operation
  • Low TDP
  • Low Power Supply requirement
  • Good overall performance in 1080p
  • Extra headroom for overclocking
  • Extra features only resulted to $1 price increase

What we didn’t like about it:

  • No backplate

RELATED:

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