Concept phones aren't quite as common as they used to be, but we've seen a few popping up again recently. OnePlus showed off their concept device with a “hidden” camera earlier this year, and Xiaomi's Mi Mix Alpha certainly turned some heads.
Vivo is the next to cook up a concept phone with the
Vivo Apex 2020
The Vivo Apex 2020 looks really cool. Concept phones generally do. This thing has zero bezels thanks to a screen that wraps fully around the device. That's not unlike the Mi Mix Alpha, but Vivo is calling their screen a 120 degree FullView Edgeless Display.
For both “aesthetic and practical purposes,” Vivo nixes the buttons on the Apex 2020 and opts for pressure sensing virtual buttons everywhere here.
Future camera tech
The camera on the Vivo Apex 2020 also seems pretty amazing. It sports a built-in gimbal to keep your videos and shots stabilized, which is a first for the industry, and has continuous 5x – 7.5x optical zoom. That's a much better optical zoom than what we typically see out of smartphones, even Samsung's Galaxy S20.
Vivo does this with two fixed lenses and two moving lenses to achieve that high-level of zoom, and using a periscope module manages to keep the phone just 6.2mm thin.
In-display front camera
We've been hearing rumblings of a camera inside of a screen for years now, and the Vivo Apex 2020 is another concept phone to take a crack at that. You'll notice that there's no camera on the front of the device, at least not in a spot that you can see it.
Instead, Vivo has placed the camera underneath the display. They've also increased the light transmittance of that particular part of the screen to 6x the levels of the rest of the screen, which should solve the issues of other in-display cameras that struggle to capture enough light for decent cameras.
Again, as of right now this is a concept phone, and I'd treat it like that going forward. It does look very cool, and there's a good chance we see some of these design features make their way into other Vivo phones in the future.
But if the Vivo Apex 2020 does ever make its way to market, brace yourself for a price tag that would rival a used car.
