Could Meizu be looking to enter the smartwatch market with a Meilan branded wearable? A newly leaked image suggests it is very possible.
With a good lineup of phones and a program to connect Meizu phones to smart appliances in your home, it would appear the Zhuhai based phone maker has everything covered. But what about a wearable?
At the Meizu MX4 launch we saw Meizu introduce the first batch of Meizu Connected devices, one of them a wearable from Chinese company InWatch. But if Meizu really wants to make waves, it is going to need a smartwatch of its own.
The image above was posted on Weibo earlier today and is reported to show the front panel of a Meilan branded wearable device. As you can see, the watch face carries the traditional Meizu home “halo,” which could be used to switch between functions. The face does not seem to have a screen, so we can expect LED notification lights and simple exercise tracking from the device, perhaps similar to the popular Xiaomi Mi Band.
What “Meilan” meant
For readers outside China, the name may need explaining. Meilan was the Chinese brand name for Meizu’s new budget line, the M series, which had started only weeks earlier with the m1 note in December 2014 and the m1 in January 2015. Internationally, those phones carried the “m” names, and years later the line would be sold abroad under the name mblu. The idea behind the line was simple: bring Meizu’s design and build to buyers who could not stretch to an MX flagship.
A Meilan wearable would therefore have been positioned as a cheap, youthful accessory, not a luxury smartwatch. That fits the leaked panel, which looks more like a fitness band than a tiny computer for your wrist.
The halo button
The circular “halo” on the leaked panel was a clear design link to Meizu’s phones. The MX4, announced in September 2014, used a single circular halo button on the front for navigation, and the same idea ran through Meizu’s software. Flyme’s mBack feature let one physical button do several jobs: a tap to go back, a press to go home. Putting a similar control on a wearable would have made it feel like part of the same family, and it would have been a natural way to switch between modes on a device without a touchscreen.
Why the Mi Band comparison made sense
The obvious benchmark was Xiaomi’s Mi Band, unveiled on July 22, 2014. It was a simple fitness and sleep tracker without a screen, using a few small lights and vibration alerts for calls and notifications. It was water resistant to IP67, claimed around 14 days of standby, and could even unlock an Android phone without a password. Above all, it was extremely cheap, and it sold in huge numbers.
Xiaomi was Meizu’s fiercest rival, and the budget Meilan line was aimed at exactly the same young buyers who were picking up a Mi Band with their Redmi phone. A Meilan band would have been a direct answer.
What a screenless band can and cannot do
It is worth being clear about what a device like the one in this leak would have offered. A band without a display is essentially a sensor with a battery. It can count steps, estimate sleep and buzz when a call or message arrives, and it can last a long time between charges because there is no screen to power. What it cannot do is show you the message, the time or your progress without reaching for your phone. For many people in 2015 that trade-off was perfectly fine, and the long battery life was a real selling point compared with the early smartwatches that needed charging every night.
What happened next
As far as we can find, the Meilan band in this leak never reached the market in the form shown. Meizu spent 2015 focused on phones: the M2 and M2 Note in June, the MX5 at the end of June along with its first power bank and a virtual reality headset, and the flagship PRO 5 in September. The InWatch partnership remained its main wearable story through the Connected program.
Meizu did eventually return to the wrist. Its product range came to include a device simply called the Meizu Watch, and in recent years the company, now part of Geely’s DreamSmart group, has expanded into other wearables under its MYVU brand, including AR glasses and a smart ring. The ambition hinted at by this leak did not disappear; it just took a very different form, and a very different company, to deliver it.
The Meilan phones themselves, meanwhile, became one of Meizu’s biggest success stories. The M series grew to include the M2, M3, M5 and M6 families and many variants in between, and phones like the M2 Note and M3 Note were among Meizu’s biggest hits in markets such as India. For the start of that story, see our report on the Meizu m1 launch at 699 Yuan.
Why it still matters
This leak is a snapshot of the moment when phone makers realized the phone alone was not enough. Every major brand now sells watches, bands and earbuds that work best with its own phones, and the goal is the same as it was for Meizu in 2015: keep customers inside one ecosystem.
If you are choosing a fitness band or smartwatch today, the lesson is to check compatibility first. Some features only work fully with a phone from the same brand, and software support for wearables can end sooner than for phones. A cheap band that keeps getting updates is often a better buy than an ambitious device that is abandoned after a year. Our look at what software support promises are actually worth applies just as much to your wrist as to your pocket.
