Meizu officially released its new generation of the mobile phone system, Flyme 9, which has brought all aspects of upgrades from UI design, interactive dynamic effects to voice chat.
When you see Flyme 9 for the first time, you will feel that it is still the familiar “small and fresh” system as a whole. But once you get started, you will be surprised at his growth. The familiar small window has moved from 2.0 to 3.0. The floating small window brings more convenience to the mobile phone’s multi-threaded operation; Aicy has also learned more new skills, providing you with an article, listening to a song, and even Continuous conversations are fine.
On Flyme 9, there is both heritage and innovation. In UI design, the Alive Design design concept, which was born in 2019, has left a deep impression on users, and on Flyme 9, it has a new interpretation of the smart and lively design.
The brand-new grid system and system-level icon redrawing make the layout of the desktop appear orderly, and the style is unified. With the addition of rich, dynamic effects and new plug-ins, the whole system will feel as if it breathes. Even if you love customization, it can strike a balance between freedom and stylization so that each of your photos has the beauty of the original system theme.
For mobile phone systems, addition is easy, but subtraction is difficult. As the system is upgraded from generation to generation, bloat is inevitable, and it is a painful decision whether to simplify the complex or to overthrow it and redo it. The latest Flyme 9 has drastically improved some of the old elements. For example, in fingerprint recognition, the original animation appears to be procrastinated under the existing unlocking speed, then directly replace with a simple circular halo. Everything is in one sentence, “Nice and invisible, natural and smooth”.
In addition to the interface and function upgrades, Flyme 9 also has surprises. That is, strict management has been carried out on the privacy and security issues of Android phones and the issues of mobile advertising.
Although permission management in the Android system has been around for a long time, compared with what we are familiar with, the privacy protection of Flyme 9 is not as simple as a switch. All-weather monitoring and management of call permissions so that every call is notified and recorded in time. Users can decide for themselves whether to submit the information and how detailed is it? Control is in his hands all the time.
Another mobile phone advertisement is a product of early developer cooperating with software vendors to subsidize costs. It always exists in the form of a pre-installed APP, system information push, and pretend to be in the information stream.
Although advertising can increase mobile phone manufacturers’ revenue, frequent mistakes in downloading advertising applications and pushing marketing information also affect the user experience. Although some manufacturers will provide options for uninstalling and closing, this behaviour still avoids a fundamental problem? As a manufacturer, are you willing to sacrifice this part of the profit to gain a better user experience?
The Meizu 18 we received was not only equipped with Flyme 9 at the factory, but also the whole phone truly achieved zero advertising, zero push, and zero pre-installation. Users can experience the ultimate pure system after purchase, install the required software directly, and do not have to worry about the interference of the pervasive advertising “psoriasis”. Regardless of other design concepts, advertising alone is worth learning from many domestic mobile phone manufacturers. Next, let’s experience Flyme 9 together and see how it will perform.
Design
In 2019, Meizu proposed Alive Design’s design concept for the first time, using white space design, smart wallpapers, and rich, dynamic effects to make the system UI full of breath.
Based on Flyme 8, following Alive Design’s design philosophy, this time, Flyme 9 continues to improve in three directions. They are light and orderly interaction and vision, novel and rich, personalized experience, and intimate motion design. Together, the three constitute the cornerstone of Flyme 9’s design.
Light and orderly interaction and vision
At this point of lightness and order, Flyme 9 continues to maximize the white space design, greatly simplifying the page design, removing complex and useless decorations, and replacing text descriptions with pictures/videos to keep the page concise while ensuring efficiency of information.
Flyme 9 has redrawn the icons to unify the design language, using the rounded rectangle style uniformly. Even made a set of algorithms to achieve adaptive adaptation to third-party icons. Even the desktop components have been transformed into a rounded rectangle style, the card-like structure is more readable, and Flyme’s various UI elements’ design language is consistent.
Innovative and rich personalized experience
The Flyme system’s rich and highly personalized screen interface has always been one of its features. This time, Flyme 9 has a lot more options for the style of the screen. It has simple text and exquisite static images. Many exquisite dynamic screen styles support user-defined import images/ Motion pictures that can meet users’ customisation needs.
Also, it is quite emotional that the small circle reminder light is also returning in this generation. Users can select the circle option in the screen settings, and they can see the classic small circle breathing light reminder when the message is prompted.
Another aspect of personalization is Alive wallpaper. Previously, Alive wallpapers could only use a few effects that come with the system to enjoy a full set of theme wallpapers and beautiful transition effects. And on Flyme 9, Alive wallpaper finally added a custom option. The user selects the picture he likes, and the system can automatically generate a dynamic effect that matches the colour of the picture.
Comfortable motion design
Flyme also almost achieves pixel-level detailing in terms of dynamic effects and strives to avoid the afterimage of the animation effect, and the transition and convergence are also perfect.
To give a simple example, only an open icon requires that the wallpaper should have a corresponding zooming action when the program is opened to achieve a visual sense of breathing. Even if the action is interrupted midway, the animation will be interrupted immediately, making the fastest response.
Interaction: mBack and full gesture navigation are combined into one floating window, and multi-threaded operation is invincible
When using the Flyme system in the past, we often entangled whether to use full-screen gestures or classic black navigation. However, this kind of entanglement will no longer exist on Flyme 9, and the two control methods have finally merged into one.
In mBack navigation settings, a side-slide return switch is added, and mBack itself has also added a side-slide multitasking function.
Therefore, when using a mobile phone, you can not only use the traditional three gestures of touch to return, press back to the desktop, and slide up the bottom for multitasking; you can also slide directly on both sides of the back to achieve rapid speed between multiple tasks. Switch. It can also slide on edge to realize the exit function. Whether you are a newcomer or a veteran, using the fusion version of mBack can quickly get started and more convenient.
The small window is also a function that we are very familiar with on Flyme 8. When it comes to Flyme 9, it has become more mature. Whether it is pop-up messages, sharing information, editing text or system settings, the small window is suitable for various usage scenarios. The matching is more perfect, realizing a real lightweight opening.
Flyme 9.0 is fully supported for light opening. The most obvious place for small window optimization is in the game scene. When you open the vertical screen application notification when the horizontal screen is displayed, the new window will be displayed in the form of a small vertical screen instead of directly jumping to the vertical screen application in the past, which will never affect the original application experience.
The small window supports 5 kinds of gesture interaction, such as sliding and hanging up the small window to become a floating small window, clicking the floating small window to return to the small window mode, pulling down the small window to change to a full-screen application, sliding up a full-screen application to change to a small window mode, and double-clicking the floating small window. The window becomes a full-screen application. However, some gestures conflict with the back, and they cannot be used simultaneously.
In the floating small window mode, the window can be fixed at the corners and run without interfering with the foreground application. If you only need to listen to the sound without looking at the screen, slide the screen to hide it. The small window also supports separate volume control and size control; you can switch the sound display in a larger form.
Camera: UI fully adaptive one-handed control and novel dynamic photo function
The changes to the camera UI this time are also efficient. The function setting options are no longer distributed on the upper and lower sides of the viewfinder but can be done with only one hand according to gesture control.
In the camera control page, in addition to swiping your finger left and right to switch between different camera modes, you can also swipe up and down to make the function bar on the upper side of the viewfinder appear in the lower part, allowing you to achieve HDR, filters and other camera options with one hand. Manipulation. Simultaneously, the further setting bar has also been optimized for one hand, with larger options and easier to call out and exit.
The new dynamic photo function is also very suitable for recording dynamic scenes that are not easy to capture. After pressing the camera button, the photo will be recorded in the form of a 3-second high-definition video, recording some fleeting, beautiful moments.
Privacy and security: All-view Hawkeye recording application reminds you of sensitive behaviours in every move
Privacy and security have not been taken seriously by manufacturers in the past. It has only recently become a new hot spot in the two camps of iOS and Android. Flyme 9 also followed closely and launched privacy security as the highlight, bringing users a full range of privacy protection.
Flyme 9’s privacy and security protection function is divided into four modules: Guardian Scepter, All-Seeing Hawkeye, Invisible Boots, and Privacy Cloak. They are responsible for authority management, authority monitoring, location information protection, and fire prevention. Was secretly transferred.
Guardian Scepter
Guardian Scepter is an upgraded version of the authority management system. Unlike the previous authorization that only completes authorization when the application is opened for the first time after installation, it will pop up every time the application invokes permissions, allowing users to understand which permissions they have allowed fully. Also, the options for granting permissions have changed. Only once, allow and deny when using, can avoid the possible harm caused by the abuse of permissions in the background.
All-seeing Hawkeye
In the past, there was a lack of records on the supervision of permissions. Unless the screen was recorded, it was difficult to prove that the program had abused permissions. Even if there is abuse, it is difficult for users to find out in time. And these problems will be solved in front of All-Seeing Hawkeye.
All-seeing Hawkeye contains four major functions, namely application behaviour recording, sensitive behaviour reminder, application management suggestions, and application explicit indication. You can record every word and deed of the application calling permissions, actively remind the user when a sensitive call occurs, and actively suggest which applications and permissions the user should pay attention to.
Even common operations such as sharing pop-ups will clearly mark the application sources of different behaviours to avoid malicious applications using similar icons for fishing in troubled waters.
Invisible boots
When apps need location permissions, we often have such contradictions. For apps such as food delivery, we worry that the positioning is not accurate enough, which will affect the delivery efficiency; for some irrelevant apps, we don’t want the positioning to be too detailed to not cause unnecessary trouble to ourselves.
The invisible magic boots function allows users to determine the accuracy of positioning themselves, thereby solving this problem. Applications that require high-precision positioning are given high-precision positioning information. For other applications, only fuzzy positioning is transmitted. Even if you encounter malicious developers, you don’t have to worry about personal details being sold.
Also, this function applies to EXIF information of photos. Let the application not know your privacy, such as your historical track through the photo information.
Cloak of privacy 
The privacy cloak is more like an extension of invisible boots. It is no longer only for personal location information but has expanded a lot in the scope of personal information. For example, clipboards, contacts, account numbers, picture files, etc., are all in its protection scope.
You must have seen a lot of software that reads personal information. Like shopping software, social software, I like to read the address book information, use your personal information to invite friends, and push links to various activities. With this feature, you can directly return to empty messages, avoiding the harassment of spam invitation links.
Some applications even automatically take screenshots to identify users’ daily chat content, delete pictures, and so on in more serious cases. The authority of these malicious behaviours can also be prohibited by privacy cloak, preventing trouble before it happens. If the program’s use also involves uploading pictures and other content, users can also selectively open the directory, which does not interfere with daily use, and at the same time protects privacy to the utmost extent.
Read Also: Meizu 16 Series Will Receive Flyme 9 Internal Beta at the end of April
Verdict
Different mobile phone systems have different tones, such as emphasising originality, emphasizing literature and art, emphasizing business, and emphasizing pragmatism. Although we always emphasize innovation, the continuity of design is equally important. While innovating, sticking to your own style and inheriting more product genes will naturally accumulate more fans.
Flyme is like this. It’s always tone has always been young people as the main group, with “small and fresh” as the main style of its design. Working silently on this basis will make people who like it more and more like it, and at the same time attract more passers-by to join the ranks of its fans.
On Flyme 9, inheritance and innovation continue. What we see is the refinement of the design and the perfection of the function. Alive Design has been played more vividly. The system’s dynamic effects are richer and more dynamic, and the rich and delicate animation makes it clear that not only Apple will deadlock the pixel-level details within a few frames.
When a system is more exquisite, it is more difficult for users to leave room for customization, but Flyme 9 is just the opposite.
Whether it is the AOD display on the screen or the cool Alive wallpaper, it supports the free addition of personal photos. Even when installing the program, there is no need to worry about third-party icons that will destroy the system’s overall beauty. Everything can be optimized by Flyme 9 to complete the adaptation.
In terms of functionality, the biggest surprise comes from two aspects. One is the new small window mode 3.0, and the other is complete privacy protection.
If the previous generation of small windows is of great use-value, then the small window mode 3.0 is almost perfect. The lightweight opening has become a daily routine ing Flyme 9, and floating small windows have also become the first choice for multi-threaded operations. Once I change the phone and go back to the system where the screen must be cut, I will be a little uncomfortable and feel that the operation is a lot more troublesome.
Although Flyme 9 is not the first mainstream system to follow up in terms of privacy protection, it has also submitted a better answer. In the system’s privacy management, it is easy to prohibit one size fits all, but Flyme is not the case. Dynamic permission control, limited release of permissions, but at the same time protecting core privacy. This is the most appropriate strategy that can take care of daily experience and privacy, and security.
Finally, under these advancements, Flyme 9 has one of the most important features, that is, 0 ads, 0 push, and 0 pre-installation. In terms of user experience, Flyme 9 has the courage of a strong man to break his wrist, abandoning a major source of income and providing users with a purer system. This alone is worthy of admiration and is far better than other products.
If you ask me how Flyme 9 is, after experiencing it, my answer is: This is a system that will never let you down. This upgrade is far from being as simple as changing a theme. At the same time, my expectation for it is the same as before; that is, how fast the adaptation is. Although stability is the king, many charm friends are looking forward to it. It is worth mentioning that Flyme 9 is pre-installed on the Meizu 18 series. If you can’t wait, you might as well take this opportunity to change your plane and try it out first.