The MX is Meizu's first smartphone to be released outside mainland China, as its launch also happened in Hong Kong at the same time, on January 1, 2012.

[5] The first rumors about a successor of the Meizu M9 leaked out in Q4 2010, even before M9's official launch itself, suggesting that a so-called M9II phone was in development, with a dual-core processor, 4-inch screen and 1 GB of RAM.

[6] Initially, this phone was supposed to look almost identical the M9,[7] although with upgraded hardware, and some media thought it could have been a competitor in China to the iPhone 5, rumored to be in development, as happened with the Meizu M9.

[2][18] Meizu assured that production and supplies would be able to meet customers' demand by 2012 Chinese New Year's Day (January 23), advising people to order the MX as soon as possible to receive it by that date.

[23] The Meizu MX is available in two variants, differing primarily for the system on a chip they use: one model uses an Exynos 4 Dual 32 nm with a dual-core 1.4 GHz ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, an ARM Mali 400 quad-core GPU and 1 GB of RAM, while the other model, named MX 4-core, uses the Exynos 4 Quad 32 nm with a quad-core 1.4 CPU (the other characteristics being equal).

It has a classic candybar shape, being rectangular with rounded corners, and presents only one central physical button at the front, like many modern touchscreen smartphones.

[25] These covers are made from double-layer plastics: the bottom one is colored and the top one is transparent, giving the back a glossy finish, similarly to other smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S III and the Huawei Honor.

The main camera has a backside illuminated CMOS sensor with autofocus; the optics have an aperture of f/2.2 and the macro focus is capable of clearly capturing objects as close as 5–10 cm.