An interesting rumor is circulating in China which says Meizu will work with Nokia on an international version of the MX4, codenamed the Meizu MX4 Supreme.
Had this rumor only shown up on a single site we would not be running it, but a number of Chinese sources are claiming the details are true, so we felt we had to post it, no matter how hard it is to swallow.
Apparently Meizu will be working on a new international version of the Meizu MX4 with Nokia. The new phone, codenamed the Meizu MX4 Supreme, would be related to the MX4 in hardware but would receive a makeover from Nokia.
Nokia would also be responsible for giving the MX4 Supreme a minimalist style, and might even have a hand in boosting camera performance with its own algorithms and optimizations.
Meizu has been making moves to grow, and partnerships with Canonical, Alibaba and Haier have been signed, so it is not completely impossible that these Nokia rumors are true.
Why the rumor sounded plausible, and why it did not
At first glance, a Meizu and Nokia phone is the kind of story that makes you check the date. But it is worth looking at what both companies were doing at the start of 2015, because it explains why the rumor spread so quickly.
Meizu was hunting for partners
Meizu was in an unusually outgoing mood. It was working with Canonical on an Ubuntu phone, it offered Alibaba’s YunOS alongside Flyme on the MX4 in China, and it was building a “Connected” program with Chinese appliance maker Haier to link its phones to smart home devices. A company signing that many deals in a few months makes almost any partnership rumor sound believable.
Nokia no longer made phones, but it still had a brand and a lab
On Nokia’s side, the situation was more complicated. In 2014 Microsoft bought Nokia’s mobile phone business outright, turning it into Microsoft Mobile. That meant Nokia, the company, no longer had a phone division of its own. What it did keep was its brand, its patents and its research arm, Nokia Technologies. In November 2014 that unit launched its first product, the Nokia N1 tablet, which was designed by Nokia but built and sold under license by a partner. The N1 showed that Nokia was willing to put its design and its name on hardware made by someone else.
From there, it was a short leap for Chinese sources to imagine a Nokia-styled phone built on Meizu hardware, with Nokia’s well regarded imaging know-how on top. The MX4 already had a strong camera sensor and a sleek metal frame, so a “Supreme” edition polished by Nokia did not sound absurd.
The phone at the center of the rumor
The MX4 itself was a strong base. Unveiled in Beijing on September 2, 2014, it had a 5.36-inch 1920 x 1152 display, a MediaTek MT6595 octa-core chip, 2 GB of RAM and a 20.7 megapixel rear camera with laser-aided autofocus, in a metal-framed body that weighed 147 grams. It was also Meizu’s first phone with LTE support. Reviewers praised its screen, speed and build, and several called it one of the best value flagships of the year. If any Meizu phone was going to be dressed up for a global audience, this was the obvious candidate.
Why it was still hard to swallow
The catch was timing and contracts. Selling Nokia branded phones again was not simply a matter of Nokia deciding to do it. Any return of the Nokia name to smartphones depended on the terms Nokia had agreed with Microsoft when it sold the phone business. And Meizu, for its part, had just built its own brand abroad and had little reason to put another company’s name on its best phone.
What happened next
The Meizu MX4 Supreme never materialized. No Meizu phone with Nokia involvement was released, and the rumor faded within weeks. Instead, Meizu’s international push in 2015 took two other forms: the MX4 Ubuntu Edition, shown at MWC in March 2015, and the regular MX4 launch in new markets, including India in May 2015. Later that year Meizu replaced the MX4 with the MX5, announced in Beijing on June 30, 2015.
Nokia’s return to phones happened in a completely different way. On May 18, 2016, Microsoft sold its Nokia branded feature phone business to HMD Global, a new Finnish company founded by former Nokia executive Jean-Francois Baril, with an associated factory in Vietnam going to Foxconn’s FIH Mobile. HMD licensed the Nokia brand for phones and announced the Android-based Nokia 6 in January 2017. The Nokia phones of the late 2010s were HMD products built with Foxconn, not Meizu.
So the rumor got one thing right: Nokia really was looking for ways to put its name back on phones made by partners. It just picked different partners, and it took two more years.
For the Meizu stories that did come true that season, see our reports on Meizu’s partnership with AKG Acoustics and the Ubuntu phone launch at MWC.
Why it still matters
The MX4 Supreme is a textbook example of how phone rumors are born. Take two real facts, a phone maker signing lots of partnerships and a famous brand without a phone business, and the internet will happily connect them. Multiple sources repeating the same claim can feel like confirmation, but often they are just copying one another.
When you read a rumor today, a few questions help: Is there a named source or only “sources”? Does it fit the contracts and business realities of both companies? Has anyone produced a photo, a certification filing or a benchmark listing? The MX4 Supreme never passed that test, and in hindsight the signs were there from the start.
