Smartphone review Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition

Rumors that the Chinese company Meizu plans to release a communicator based on Ubuntu Touch appeared at the beginning of last year. During 2014, the company periodically demonstrates the prototype of the device at exhibitions and in the fall announces that the Meizu MX4 on Ubuntu Touch will be released in December, reports some technical details and opens a pre-order. Finally, after a brief lull, 05/17/2015 Ubuntu-version of the smartphone appeared in the Meizu online store at a price of ¥ 1799, i.e. ≈ $ 290 (and only a 16-gigabyte model in white or golden colors), but you could buy the MX4 Ubuntu Edition only in a couple of days: then the Ubuntu option suddenly disappeared from the list of available ones; at the same time, the starting price dropped to ¥ 1499 (≈ $ 240).

I managed to get to know better the MX4 Ubuntu Edition, the device is undoubtedly very interesting, but left me with an ambiguous impression. On the Internet, there are already pretty good reviews of both Ubuntu Touch in general (in isolation from hardware) and the “regular” MX4 (on Android ), so I won’t retell them in detail, but try to describe the communicator as the end product with a “geek” point of view, focusing on the operating system.

Unboxing and first impressions

The smartphone comes in an ordinary cardboard box without frills; inside you find a small parallelepiped pulled in white plastic and a cardboard dummy placeholder (apparently, usually there are additional accessories hidden in it, but with the MX4 Ubuntu Edition only the cable and USB adapter for charging are included - they are next to the smartphone inside the white box; it’s a pity that I didn’t succeed in taking a beautiful picture of this unpacking step).


The device itself is quite large; Still, the ideal screen size for me is 4 ″ (like the Nokia N9), while the MX4 has a diagonal of 5.36 ″. The metal frame-frame on the side is very similar to the sixth iPhone and looks great, especially from certain angles, as in this promo render:


At the top are a 3.5 ″ headphone jack and an on-lock button, on the left side there is a volume rocker (I have a little backlash), at the bottom there are speaker holes and a micro-USB connector. The back cover is plastic, glossy, but not easily soiled; Fit to the body almost perfectly, removed with difficulty. Under it are a non-removable (in any case simple) battery and a lone tray for a µSIM card: it cannot boast of support for several SIM cards or a microSD card MX4. But there is also a spoonful of honey: you can connect USB-sticks, they are easily mounted and read, albeit at a low speed (about 10 MB / s).


The main technical characteristics of the device:

CPU	MediaTek MT6595 (4 cores A17 2.2 GHz + 4 cores A7 1.7 GHz)
Graphics chip	PowerVR G6200
RAM	2 GB
Display	5.36 ″ IPS (New Mode 2), 1920 × 1152 (418 PPI), 1100: 1,500 cd / m²
Main camera	20.7 MP, 1 / 2.3 ″ CMOS (Sony Exmor IMX 220), dual LED flash (2200 / 5500K), ISO 1600, f / 2.2, 78 °, 4K @ 30fps / 720p @ 120fps, H.265
Front-camera	2.0 MP, 1080p @ 30fps
Communication (cellular)	TD-LTE (1900/2300/2600 MHz), LTE FDD (1800/2100/2600 MHz), TD-SCDMA (1880-1920 / 2010-2025 MHz), WCDMA / HSPA + (805/900/1900/2100 MHz) , GSM / GPRS / EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz)
Communication (other)	802.11a / b / g / n / ac (2.4 / 5.0 GHz), Bluetooth 4.0, USB
Navigation	GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou
ROM	16 GB (≈12 GB available), non-expandable :-(
Battery	3100 mAh (non-removable)
Dimensions and weight (weight)	144.0 × 75.2 × 8.9 mm, 147 g

The first time you turn it on, you will need to wait for a greeting (the smartphone starts and restarts for a rather long time, a little less than a minute), be glad that it is really Ubuntu, not Android, answer a couple of standard questions and see a short demo about swipe control (you can skip) .

Here I must say a few words about gesture control. It is best implemented, in my opinion, in the same Nokia N9 (MeeGo). The idea is that the finger crossing each of the four edges of the screen is tactile and cognitively different from the swipes inside the screen (application), and up to 8 functions (four sides and two directions) can be hung on them, such as: switching between states (screens ) and applications, closing the active application (I really liked this feature in MeeGo; in iOS and Android you have to first send the application to background, and only then kill it from the list), pulling the “curtain” and quick launch, application menu, etc. . This, in turn, allows you to abandon the "Home" button of the comrades, which means to increase the useful space of the display. After Nokia N9, I developed a persistent allergy to these "extra" buttons,

At the same time, the central button in MX4 remained in place, and the transition to the previous screen in multi-flopped applications (for example, in system settings) is implemented as in iOS: an arrow appears to the left of the title (somewhat ugly, for my taste; in iOS, it looks neater ) In general, control in the MX4 Ubuntu Edition is a kind of hybrid of MeeGo and iOS approaches, the solution is not undeniable, but in any case it is clearly better than Android.

Ubuntu touch

You can start familiarizing yourself with the Canonical mobile OS from the official site . In addition to gesture-oriented management, another proprietary “feature” of Ubuntu Touch is the so-called. scopes, such aggregators of content of a certain type, which in theory should save the user from the need to manually sort through the necessary applications. So, all the news is collected in one place, the "world around" (weather, upcoming events, concerts, places in the ε-neighborhood, etc.) - in another. Similarly grouped photos (local and from your social networks), music, video, etc.


Data sources (eg news agencies for News scopes) can be filtered, but you can’t add new sources to existing scopes (this is a known problem ). But you can create your own scopes. Forcing content to be updated (where this operation makes sense) is possible, as is customary everywhere, by pulling the page down and releasing it. News, by the way, is shown in the language that is set as the system language in the settings.

All right, apps and scopes will wait. It's time to get into the settings (you need to at least set the time zone and add a Russian keyboard), well, in general, see what's what.


There are not very many settings (which is for the top level, IMHO, good). Immediately striking Rotation Lock (under the search bar); By the way, unlike Android, here it is implemented correctly (as in iOS). On the screenshot of Language & Text, one can notice a strange thing : Display language shows that Russian is selected, although the interface language is clearly English. Further it will become clear how it happened.


The upper "curtain" seemed to me much more convenient than in Android. Everything is somehow logically grouped and immediately at hand. Let's say in the Network menu I can immediately switch to airplane mode (radio silence), go to the settings of the cellular network, turn off WiFi or choose which access point to connect to. The other tabs are just as informative and interactive (in the screenshots below are the three extreme on the right):


Because I promised not to get involved, I won’t talk about the browser, the camera (everything is fine with them, unless the browser crashes too often), audio (understands .ogg, .mp3, .flac, but .ape, alas, no) or video players (downloaded from .mp4 files play without problems) and go straight to the conclusions. Ubuntu Touch as a whole looks promising, but still very raw. What I did not like in the first place (in random order):

• The interface (the system itself and many applications) is rigidly tied to the selected language. Out of habit, choosing “English (United States)” will give you 12-hour time and Fahrenheit at the same time. You have to choose some more suitable locale, such as "English Canada" or "English Denmark". However, as you might already guess, this is not the only way out. ;-)
• The context menu is not always implemented, or it is somehow implemented differently. For example, you cannot select and copy a phone number in the call list, select part of the text in an SMS message, etc. In some applications (for example, in the browser), the context menu is called up by a long press, in others it is necessary to move the object left or right (this is how you can copy the message text or delete it), which is not always obvious. It’s not always possible to paste (paste) previously selected text, more or less reliably it works except in ordinary input fields. In Android, I can paste text from the buffer into almost any form on websites, in Ubuntu Touch - no.
• It is not possible to create a Bluetooth or WiFi hotspot in the network settings, although this is provided for by the specification (apparently, the AP mode is not supported by the card driver, and there are not enough kernel modules for BNEP, see below).
• Sometimes the smartphone asks you to re-enter the password for the known WiFi network. (If you click "Cancel" and select it from the list, it connects quietly.)
• You cannot rename the device in the Bluetooth settings (however, you can from the command line).
• In the file manager there is no way to transfer the file via Bluetooth, NFC, or ad-hoc WiFi; similarly, a photo in the Gallery can only be shared on social networks, a musical composition or video can only be played. Here, Ubuntu Touch has so far drained Android. :-(
• The browser cannot connect through a proxy ( known problem ). Unfortunately, the browser works through the Chromium Content API via Oxide, and is not based, for example, on the Orthodox Firefox / Gecko. User-agent: "Mozilla / 5.0 (Linux; Ubuntu 14.04 like Android 4.4) AppleWebKit / 537.36 Chromium / 35.0.1870.2 Mobile Safari / 537.36."
• There is no way to record telephone conversations or even just a voice recorder.
• No FM radio. With the Nokia N9, I could listen to the radio using the headphone wire as an antenna.
• The alarm does not turn off, and the phone does not go into silent mode temporarily during an incoming call when it is turned over (an extremely convenient feature of MeeGo is to turn the smartphone lying on the table much faster than pick it up and press the “Mute” or “End” button).
• I still did not understand if any LED indication is provided. The smartphone never blinked at anything except the central touch button. About missed calls or a low battery visually does not notify.
• Speaking of battery: it holds about a day, nothing outstanding. (The graph of battery consumption can be seen in the screenshot above.)
• When a USB mouse is connected, the cursor does not appear on the screen (the mouse works at the same time).
• The Document Viewer application , although it can open PDF files, does not have a comfortable reading: it crashes too often and does not allow you to conveniently scroll the text (fixing the horizontal position of the page). Random zoom in / out of the text or rotation of the screen turns into torture: the font becomes unreadable until the end of the operation, which takes a long time (1-2 s).
• There are very few applications in general in the Ubuntu Store; most clients of the same social networks are not really native programs, but only shells over the web interface (so-called webapps).
• Sometimes for some time smoothing disappears at the borders of icons and buttons; not everywhere is spelled correctly (with a capital letter) and the names of the months are inclined (June 7, 2015) or the plural suffix -s is used (1 call s made today) - despite the fact that gettext / libintl and frunixes have been able to do this for a long time, and other small ones interface flaws.
• Very much from many places stick out ears Android pieces.
• Non-removable battery, small ROM, inability to use memory cards.

Fortunately, you can completely overcome some of the problems yourself: the device is not specially fenced in any way, the shell is provided as standard (including remotely via ADB or SSH), there is root access and all that - it's Linux, baby! Many answers can be found, oddly enough, in Google. It’s worth a quick look at the wiki page to make it easier to google.

Pick up a file

By default, ADB is not available, it must be enabled through About this phone → Developer mode . At the same time, for some reason, they are required to set a 4-digit screen unlock code or password; I hope that in the future they will add something like a daw "I know what I'm doing."

On the host (working computer), you will need to install the android-tools-adb package ; You may also need to configure access rights to USB devices and add $HOME/.android/adb_usb.iniMeizu's manufacturer identifier (Vendor ID) (0x2a45) to the file.

You can do without ADB by raising the SSH server through the terminal and work remotely. Terminal applicationnot installed by default, but available in the Ubuntu Store (requires an Ubuntu One account; fortunately, my existing login on the lunchpad came up). It would be generally great if for free applications they immediately gave a direct download link without any identification, but so far. Launch the terminal and write:

$ sudo service ssh start
$ sudo setprop persist.service.ssh true

The second command is needed if you want the SSH server to start automatically. Please note: sudo(8)did not ask for a password, i.e. by default, the user phabletpassword is empty. If you install it through passwd(8), you will have to enter it when you unlock the screen. In turn, putting a 4-digit unlock code in the system settings, you will have to enter it to launch the terminal (on the smartphone) and for sudo(8).

But that’s not all: the SSH server will only let you in by key, which can be easily verified by looking at the launch command:

$ ps ax | grep sshd
 4282 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd -D -o PasswordAuthentication=no
 4344 ?        Ss     0:00 sshd: phablet [priv]
 4359 ?        S      0:00 sshd: phablet@pts/11

It pleases - password authentication should be a thing of the past. How to copy a public key to a smartphone is described by the link, and is no different from the standard procedure. Unfortunately, a WiFi connection is rarely stable enough for comfortable operation: lags occur, prolonged sticking, up to disconnection.

Running the terminal, trying to execute several commands and making sure that this is a full-fledged environment (and not the crashed BusyBox), you experience a strange sensation. No longer need to wonder whether there is a handy wget(1), rsync(1), nc(1)interpreters Perl or Python - all have (or almost all). And if not, then you can put it as usual through apt-get, however, for this you will first have to switch the device to read-write mode , or at leastremount the root (for full access to /var/cache/apt). Keep in mind that this is not officially supported mode of the smartphone: it does not work automatic OTA-updates and in general, use at your own risk. I don’t think that having put a few leaf packages, we’ll seriously break something, but it’s apt-get upgradeworth doing it with much more caution (if at all).

If you don’t want to get into any trouble yet, you can simply download the package you are interested in through apt-get downloadand unpack it wherever you want. For many simple programs this will be enough.

Well, first of all, we will deal with the language and normal hours (the so-called military time) instead of the 12-hour AM / PM misunderstanding. If you look at the sources of ubuntu-system-settings , namely the fileplugins/language/language-plugin.cpp, you can see that the selected language is translated to the locale and stupidly assigned to two user properties in the accountsservice : Language and FormatsLocale. Until this bug is fixed, we simply correct FormatsLocale manually after setting the language in the settings:

$ dbus-send --print-reply --system --dest=org.freedesktop.Accounts /org/freedesktop/Accounts/User$UID \
    org.freedesktop.Accounts.User.SetFormatsLocale string:ru_RU.UTF-8
$ sudo reboot

A reboot is needed for the changes to take effect. Here is the result:

$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=ru_RU.UTF-8
LC_TIME=ru_RU.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=ru_RU.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=ru_RU.UTF-8
LC_NAME=ru_RU.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=ru_RU.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=ru_RU.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=ru_RU.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=ru_RU.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

This explains the funny discrepancy between the selected and the real interface language in the screenshot above. True, for some reason, the degrees in Fahrenheit remained in the weather forecast.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth is only nominally supported so far: there is a section in the settings, and in general that's all. You can’t even change the name of the device. I also did not succeed in initiating pairing with a computer (the smartphone nevertheless knows how to accept and respond to pair requests). File transfer, as I said, is not implemented. Let's try to fix this unenviable situation even a little.

Temporarily (until the next reboot) you can change the name of the device using the utility hciconfig(8):

$ sudo hciconfig -a hci0 name 'A Better Name'

To save the new name after reboot, modify the file/etc/machine-info (symlink to /etc/writable/machine-info) and, if desired, restart the Bluetooth service:

$ sudo service bluetooth restart

I usually use a laptop and a program to share files via Bluetooth obexapp(1). First you need to initiate pairing from the laptop (FreeBSD): for this, add to the /etc/bluetooth/hcsecd.confnew device with the MAC address of the smartphone and come up with some kind of PIN-code. We will also need to enable authentication, and we can establish a connection (by MAC address or name, if you specified one in /etc/bluetooth/hosts):

# hccontrol -n ubt0hci write_authentication_enable 1
# hccontrol -n ubt0hci create_connection mx4

A window will pop up on your smartphone where you will need to enter our PIN-code. After the devices exchanged keys (link keys), forced authentication of connections can be disabled.

Files are transferred via Bluetooth via FTRN (OBEX File Transfer service) or OPUSH (OBEX Push service). On smartphones running Android, usually the second, here you need to use FTRN:

$ obexapp -n -C FTRN -a mx4 put "04 - In Your Room.flac"
35696810 bytes streamed in 968 seconds (36876 bytes/sec)

Files are uploaded to /tmp(tmpfs), which suits me perfectly. Modification time is not saved, keep in mind (if you are an mtime freak). Compared with the Samsung Galaxy S3, the transfer speed was 2-4 times lower and did not exceed 45 kB / s. :-(

Okay, we can upload files (albeit not quickly) to a smartphone. What about the other way around? Everything is worse here: the downloaded files turn out to be of zero length (maybe the problem is on the receiving side):

$ obexapp -n -C FTRN -a mx4 get "04 - In Your Room.flac"
0 bytes streamed in 919 seconds (0 bytes/sec)

It’s easier to transfer files via rsync(1)or scp(1).

Hotspot / tethering

What is still very lacking in Meizu MX4 is the ability to distribute cellular Internet via Bluetooth or WiFi: there is simply no such item in the settings, although support for hotspots in ubuntu-system-settings appeared a long time ago .

There are hostapd and iw packages in the repository (not installed by default), but with Wi-Fi , a bummer came out immediately:

$ iw list | grep -A 3 'Supported interface modes'
        Supported interface modes:
                 * IBSS
                 * managed
        Band 1:

Those. AP mode is not supported. None of the WiFi dongles I have (ZyDAS and Ralink) are recognized by the kernel. With bluetooth, too, nothing happened abruptly:

$ sudo modprobe bnep
modprobe: ERROR: ../libkmod/libkmod.c:557 kmod_search_moddep() could not open moddep file '/lib/modules/3.10.35+/modules.dep.bin'
$ lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by
$ ls -l /lib/modules
total 0
$ _

How to take screenshots

Ubuntu Touch can take not only screenshots, but also screencasts ! For this review, I used the following commands (on a smartphone):

$ mirscreencast -n 1 -m /var/run/mir_socket
... несколько строк ругани, это не страшно
$ mv /tmp/mir_screencast_1152x1920_60.85Hz.rgba shotX.rgba

On the host, the received files can be converted to PNG format, which is perfectly handled by the utility convert(1)from the ImageMagick package; Here is an example of gluing three screens into one picture:

$ convert +append -resize 25% -alpha off -depth 8 -size 1152x1920 rgba:shot{1,2,3}.rgba shot.png

Reduced by four times, they, of course, lost in entertainment, but the resolution is really huge in a smartphone.

Conclusion and Conclusions

If you need a smartphone in which everything immediately works “out of the box” and there is an application car, then the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition (at least in the form in which it is at the time of writing this text) is unlikely to suit you. The phrase “file after assembly” in this case is more than appropriate.

If you are used to a more or less full-fledged Unix environment, you want to have full access to the file system and services, do not worry about some missing functions and a lack of programs, but you are ready to endure (even better, fix) bugs, experiment, google and read the source code - you should pay attention to the MX4, because in contrast to custom builds, in this case we are dealing with official support of the Ubuntu Touch manufacturer, i.e. There is every chance that at some point the main jambs will be fixed, and the market will be filled with good, suitable applications.