Meizu m3s brings all-metal sandblasted body, upmarket goodies with a budget price tag

This April, Meizu launched a great budget offering with super-fast eMMC 5.1 memory and a price tag of slightly over $100 (not including taxes) in the face of the Meizu M3. Now, the manufacturer has announced an updated version of the handset, called the Meizu m3s, that sports a sandblasted metal body, fingerprint reader, bigger battery and yet again an enticing price.

The Meizu m3s looks more expensive than it actually is with an all-metal sandblasted chassis and an mTouch 2.1 fingerprint reader beneath the home button that has a touted response speed of 0.2s. This is the same fingerprint scanner that Meizu is including in its more expensive offerings and has a promised wear resistance of 10 million touches, which is quite impressive for a budget device.

The m3s rocks the same MediaTek MT6750 octa-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz that we saw in the Meizu M3, and the same Mali T860 GPU, but offers more in terms of battery life with a beefed up 3020 mAh battery. The screen is also not too different from that of the M3, in terms of its specs at least. The 5-incher is tucked under a layer of 2.5D glass and has a resolution of 720 x 1280 with a pixel density of 296 PPI, which is the quality-to-be-expected in this price range.

The expected launch date for the Meizu m3s is June 18. The device will ship in four colors, all of which will have fancy official names – we're sure – but for now we'll be calling them gold, gray, silver and pink, and will be available in versions with 3GB and 2GB of RAM, just like the M3. The version with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal memory is expected to be priced at around $106 (699 Yuan), while the 3GB RAM + 32GB ROM should be available for around $136 (899 Yuan) (not including taxes and shipping).