At CES 2018, Vivo announced its partnership with Synaptics to bring a phone having an under-display fingerprint sensor, which is already up for sale in China. And now at MWC 2018, Vivo revealed its new concept phone named Apex, which seems to have come straight from the future. The company hasn’t detailed any specifications of the phone, but it’s the design Vivo is trying to focus on with bezels further tripped towards the edge.
A mysterious device by Vivo appeared online a few weeks ago with one of the highest screen-to-body ratios and there are chances for it to be the Vivo Apex. Nevertheless, Apex has got a flip-up front-facing camera that came into being after no space was left on the phone’s front and the company wanted to avoid having a notch. Other than these features it also houses an audio technology known as screen sound casting, which makes the sound emanate from the display itself, since the phone doesn’t have a conventional earpiece.
One of the first thing to check out on the Apex is, of course, its screen-to-body ratio. The bezels of the device measure 1.8mm on three sides, except for the bottom part of its OLED display. According to some reports, if the phone ever comes out in the market, Vivo will be cutting down the bezels even further to achieve a screen-to-body ratio of 98 percent, making it the first company to do so.
The only problem with the ever slimming bezels is to find a place for the front-facing camera and Vivo already has the answer to it. In the prototype displayed by the company, if the camera app is opened in selfie mode, the front-facing camera pops up from the top taking about 0.8 seconds and it retracts once you’re done clicking photos.
Talking about the under-display fingerprint sensor, Vivo had demoed the technology on the X20 Plus UD at the CES 2018 last month. The device used an under-display fingerprint scanner from Synaptics of size just about that of a fingertip. But the one used in Vivo Apex covers a much larger display area around the middle portion giving the users a much larger area to scan their fingers. With its size, it can even scan more than one fingerprint at a time.
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Vivo as of now has no plans of launching Apex in the near future for it currently being a concept design. Meanwhile, the Vivo X20 Plus is already available for purchase in China and we hope the company brings the device to more markets in the coming months.
See our full MWC 2018 coverage here.
