Rumors about a #Nokia-#Meizu partnership are intensifying

Meizu, just like many Chinese manufacturers, doesn’t hesitate to use anything connected to Nokia to promote their devices. Last October Meizu sent a Nokia E71 with the invitation to a launch event for their phone, and earlier this year a huge story broke off that HMD is resurrecting the NSeries, but it turned out to be a marketing stunt by a Chinese manufacturer called 360.

Last few days we are seeing more and more rumors about a potential collaboration between Nokia and Meizu, and to be honest, I’m quite sure that this is another “Meizu promo prank”, but recent leaks suggest otherwise. On May 24th, a picture with the iconic “Handshake” surface on the web, with the Meizu logo and mentioning an event in June. My first thought when I saw the picture was it’s a false flag, so we decided not to cover it.

But, a day after, two images leaked that suggest that Nokia or HMD are really going to partner with Meizu. A leaked picture shows the “Meizu Flyme Download Center” with the Nokia 6 mentioned as a supported device. Flyme OS is Meizu’s Android based OS, with latest version being Flyme 6. A second photo with the Nokia and Meizu logo, and mentioning Meizu’s mBack technology leaked as well.

Nokia 6 on the Flyme page

Gizchina, that first reported about this in English, says: “The second rumour suggests that Meizu might be willing to share their mBack technology with Nokia. mBack is a Meizu feature that allows the hardware button to allow the user to easily navigate through applications that are running in the background. As this again is a rumour we don’t know for sure if the technology share with be integrated into the Flyme system or if Meizu has some particular hardware that it intends to licence to Nokia.” Check the demo of mBack down below.

YouTube

I think HMD’s priority should be pushing the already announced Android version of Nokia 6, and 5 & 3, on other markets as well, because we are waiting for a global release now 5 months from early January when the 6 for China was announced. On the other hand, China is a hard market to have good sales in, because of numerous local players that no matter what you do, will always offer better specifications for the same amount of money. Partnering with a local player could help HMD leave a strong footprint there, but for heaven’s sake, please first release the device with Android worldwide, and after that you can offer a Windows version if you want as well.

via: Nokians.fr 1, 2; Gizchina 1, 2