VIVO stole the limelight as it showcased the phone of the future the VIVO APEX in MWC this year at CES it was a prototype phone that was showcased at the CES and boy it looks promising in every single way.
The concept phone is called Apex, and its headline feature is what Vivo describes as “Half-Screen In-Display Fingerprint Scanning Technology.” The idea here is that instead of placing your finger on a thumbnail-sized icon to unlock the phone, you’ll be able to do so in a much larger area of the display.
Apex, as a device, is one of the most aggressive expressions of that ideal yet, with almost imperceptible bezels around three sides of the phone and a larger — but still skinny — one on the bottom edge. And as such, Vivo has needed to find solutions for the kind of features that’d usually require bezels to function.
The most obvious one of these is the selfie camera. Some phone makers have gotten around this with notches, others by relocating the camera below the screen so that you have to hold the phone upside down. But Apex’s answer is both inventive and kind of cute — the 8-megapixel camera is hidden behind the screen and pops up like a periscope when needed. It takes 0.8 seconds to ready itself and makes a little whirring sound — I thought the mechanism would be flimsy, but it actually feels really solid. If nothing else, it’s a neat way to avoid the notch.
The concept phone is called Apex, and its headline feature is what Vivo describes as “Half-Screen In-Display Fingerprint Scanning Technology.” The idea here is that instead of placing your finger on a thumbnail-sized icon to unlock the phone, you’ll be able to do so in a much larger area of the display.
Apex, as a device, is one of the most aggressive expressions of that ideal yet, with almost imperceptible bezels around three sides of the phone and a larger — but still skinny — one on the bottom edge. And as such, Vivo has needed to find solutions for the kind of features that’d usually require bezels to function.
The most obvious one of these is the selfie camera. Some phone makers have gotten around this with notches, others by relocating the camera below the screen so that you have to hold the phone upside down. But Apex’s answer is both inventive and kind of cute — the 8-megapixel camera is hidden behind the screen and pops up like a periscope when needed. It takes 0.8 seconds to ready itself and makes a little whirring sound — I thought the mechanism would be flimsy, but it actually feels really solid. If nothing else, it’s a neat way to avoid the notch.
The lack of bezels also means there’s no space for a conventional earpiece speaker. Xiaomi’s Mi Mix addressed this with a piezoelectric design that worked similar to bone conduction technology, but Vivo’s approach here is to vibrate the entire screen itself like a speaker — you can still hear phone calls without holding the device to your head. I’ve heard better quality calls in my time, but it’s totally usable.
Apex is purely a concept, and Vivo says it has no plans to release an actual product in this particular form
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