Unverified Weibo posts in China claim to show the upcoming Meizu m1 mini, its specifications, its pricing and even the three operating systems it will come with.
It is only six days until we see what Meizu, Li Nan and the rest of the team have ready to launch, and the leaks and teasers are flooding in faster than ever. Earlier this evening, unverified images made their way onto Weibo listing a few of the details of the smaller Meizu m1 phone.
Please do not take these images as fact, but if they are genuine they are very exciting!
The images say that there will be six colors of the Meizu m1 mini, and that the phone will have a 5-inch 720p display (not the 4.7-inch display that earlier case listings suggested), a 13 megapixel main camera and, most interesting of all, a choice of Flyme, YunOS or Ubuntu!
If this is the case, then we will finally have the Ubuntu phone that Meizu has been promising for so long. As for pricing, the images say the Meizu m1 mini will cost 799 Yuan in China, or roughly $128.
Why a three-OS phone was such a big deal
To understand why this leak caused so much excitement, it helps to remember where Meizu stood at the start of 2015. The company had built its reputation on Flyme, its heavily customized version of Android, which first appeared on the Meizu MX in 2012 and was known for its flat design and one-handed usability. By 2014, Flyme 4.0 had even been made available on some devices from other manufacturers.
At the same time, Meizu was experimenting with alternatives. When the Meizu MX4 was announced in September 2014, it became the first Meizu phone to offer Alibaba’s YunOS alongside Flyme for the mainland Chinese market. And in November 2014, Meizu and Canonical signed an agreement that set the starting point for Meizu devices running Ubuntu Touch.
So a single budget phone offering all three would have tied together every software thread Meizu was pulling at the time: its own Android skin, a Chinese cloud OS backed by a giant partner, and an open source Linux platform with enthusiastic fans in Europe. For a phone rumored to cost around $128, that would have been remarkable.
What happened next
The launch came a week later, on January 28, 2015, and several parts of this leak turned out to be wrong.
- The name. The phone launched as the Meizu m1, not the m1 mini. In China it belonged to the Meilan line, the budget range that started with the m1 note in December 2014.
- The price. It came in lower than the leak suggested, at 699 Yuan rather than 799 Yuan, with sales starting on February 5, 2015.
- The display. The 5-inch size was right, but the resolution was 1280 x 768 at around 300 pixels per inch, slightly more than the 720p in the leak.
- The camera. The 13 megapixel main camera was accurate, paired with a 5 megapixel front camera.
- The colors. The m1 did arrive in a range of bright colors, with interchangeable colored back shells.
The part everyone cared about most, the operating system choice, did not happen on the m1. It shipped as a Flyme phone. Meizu’s Ubuntu device arrived a month later, but it was not a budget model at all: it was the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition, presented at Mobile World Congress in March 2015 and released in Europe through an invite-only system on June 25, 2015. It was the second commercially available Ubuntu Touch phone, after the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition went on sale in Europe in February 2015.
You can follow how that played out in our report on Meizu confirming the MX4 would be shown with Ubuntu at MWC, and see how the m1 launch date itself was announced in Meizu to launch m1 mini on the 28th Jan.
How Ubuntu on phones ended
Meizu did make a second Ubuntu phone. The Meizu PRO 5 Ubuntu Edition was showcased at MWC 2016 and went on sale in February 2016. But the platform never found a mass market. On April 5, 2017, Canonical’s CEO Mark Shuttleworth announced that the company would stop supporting Ubuntu Touch because of a lack of market interest. The project did not disappear entirely: it was taken over by the UBports community, which still develops Ubuntu Touch today and supports a number of devices that hobbyists have ported it to.
Flyme, meanwhile, kept evolving. Later versions followed Android releases for years, and after Geely’s DreamSmart group took control of Meizu in 2022, the software was reworked into Flyme AIOS, with a strong focus on AI features and on connections with cars.
Why it still matters
This leak is a good reminder of two things. First, pre-launch images that look official often mix accurate details with wishful thinking. The screen size, camera and color range were right. The price, name and headline feature were not. The feature people most wanted to be true was the one that turned out to be false.
Second, the dream behind it, a phone where you choose the operating system, has never really arrived in the mainstream. Buyers today still pick an ecosystem first and hardware second. The closest thing to the promise of this leak is the small community that installs alternative operating systems such as Ubuntu Touch on supported devices, and they are doing it themselves rather than choosing from a menu at checkout.
If you are shopping now, the question that matters most is not which OS a phone could run, but how long its maker will keep the software it ships with up to date. We look at that in detail in what software support promises are actually worth.
