If you haven’t been following the story of Meizu, you’ve missed quite the spectacle. One of China’s many fine electronics manufacturers, Meizu first gained notoriety with the M8 miniOne, a Windows Phone CE 6 handset hacked and tweaked to look strikingly similar to an iPhone — so much so, in fact, that Apple purportedly unleashed their lawyers on them earlier this month.
For the past few months, Meizu has been talking up their next handset: the Android-powered (and hopefully less iOS-esque) M9. Though it’s seen more than it’s fair share of delays, Meizu has managed to keep things mostly under wraps. Besides a few mostly nebulous shots released (and then quickly pulled) by the company’s CEO, the M9 has successfully dodged the camera lens.. until now.
In an almost-questionably sudden manner, a plethora of M9 shots have all leaked out this morning on the official Chinese Meizu forums, spotted first by the fans at Meizu Me:
Last but not least (but also not really “leaked”), the design firm behind the M9 has released what looks to be a rendered shot of the handset’s rear:
All in all, it looks … pretty much as you’d expect hardware from a Chinese factory known for clones to look: about as generic as possible. At an unlocked price of around $360 bucks, though, the supposed specs — a 3.6″ screen running at 720×480 (or a Retina-display-challenging 960×640, depending on whether or not a claim from Meizu’s founder holds true), 1Ghz CPU, 5 megapixel camera, and HDMI out — might make up for that a bit, be it that they pan out.