Today in China Vivo unveiled a new series of smartphones that will occupy their “flagship” position for the company. Eschewing the current trend of notches, Vivo has gone in their own direction to make features like a front-facing camera, speakers, and fingerprint scanners available in a way that maximizes the screen real estate and minimizes bezels. Vivo claims the new NEX has achieved an industry best 91.24% screen to body ratio.
It may be a bit presumptuous, but Vivo Senior Vice President Alex Feng says the “launch of NEX finally brings an end to the industry's pursuit of a true bezel-less device.” Three technologies contribute to end result. Perhaps the most innovative of the bunch is pop-up camera – or what Vivo has branded the “Elevating Front Camera” – that stays housed in the body of the camera until needed for a selfie.
The other technologies Vivo used include an In-Display Fingerprint Scanner. Most other smartphone manufacturers are still chasing the idea of an in-display fingerprint scanner so they can abandon a traditional, dedicated scanner. Vivo is on their third generation of devices that use the technology. Finally, Vivo employs “Screen SoundCasting Technology” to effectively turn the screen into a speaker. This means they were able to get rid of front-facing speaker grills. Vivo claims this also delivers better bass and treble.
All of these features have been put into producing a smartphone that has a front that is all screen. It is quite a screen too measuring 6.59-inches. Vivo did go with a Super AMOLED display and in perhaps the only spec that is not at a state of the art level, it is only full HD as opposed to Quad HD.
Internal components are just as impressive as what Vivo has done with the exterior. The NEX is packed with a Snapdragon 845 processor, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard storage. To try to keep things running as long as possible, the NEX gets a 4,000mAh battery. In addition to the pop-up front-facing camera which is an 8MP unit, the NEX has a 12MP + 5MP dual sensor rear-facing camera. Vivo has also imbued as much as they could with their own flavor of AI, going so far as to have a dedicated button for quick access to their Jovi voice assistant. The NEX will run Funtouch OS 4.0 which Vivo says is based on Android 8.1.
Vivo has not released pricing information, but the bad news in regards to availability is that Vivo is only launching the NEX in China. Perhaps additional markets will be added in the future, but a U.S. release is probably unlikely.
