It was launched on January 1, 2011, resulting in buyers lining up overnight to enter stores to purchase the device.

Another delay was caused by the validation process of the phone by the China Academy of Telecommunication Research.

Because Meizu Technology Co., ltd wanted to compete with Apple, the company had to use the same retina screen as the iPhone 4.

The Meizu M9 features "Hummingbird" (S5PC110) SoC with 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU and PowerVR 540 GPU[3][4][5] along with 512 MB RAM, 8–16 GB internal flash memory, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 3.54-inch capacitive touchscreen display with 640x960 pixels resolution.

Because of the improved pixel density, text in zoomed-out views of the web browser or other applications can be read, and graphics such as those of games appear sharper.

The Flyme OS from the new MX device was backported to M9 with a few features disabled; bringing Android 4.0 support, increased performance and a new UI.

The main difference with Meizu M9 from most smartphones like iPhones is that the keyboard does not rotate to landscape mode when the phone is reoriented.

Also it can easily switch from Chinese to English and vice versa simply by pushing the “EN” and “CH” buttons respectively.

Upon pushing the “Home” button on the middle of the screen, the user is immediately connected to the default homepage of the Meizu web browser.

The screen can scroll up, down, left, right and also zoom in and out with just the touch of the finger making it easier to read.

Critics have stated that the storage ROM for the phone isn't stable enough for full customer reliability.

Its success could be as a result of low project target sales or unexpected popularity of the product.