Vivo

Meizu and Vivo are trying to usher in a new breed of smartphones, a kind of smartphone that even Apple is believed to be considering. The kind of smartphone that's glass on all sides and edges, unbroken by any seam or hole, aside perhaps for the cameras on the back. The Meizu Zero and Vivo APEX 2019 Concept Phone are truly sights to behold. They still leave a few questions open, probably to be answered at MWC 2019 next week. But whether they get answered or not, there are a few things that make this kind of unibody phone far too ahead of their time.

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Chinese smartphone makers are at it again. Last year, Vivo and OPPO tried to reinvent smartphone design with their elevating cameras. This year, Meizu and Vivo are trying to usher in the age of seamless unibody phones. The former kicked it of with the Meizu Zero yesterday and now Vivo is doing the same. But while the Vivo APEX 2019 Concept Phone is undoubtedly a thing of beauty, it naturally raises a few usability questions that we won’t be able to answer until we wrap our hands around one.

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Today some images of the Vivo Apex 2019 were leaked - or revealed on purpose - before the official launch of the Vivo Apex 2019. These images showed the device to look, at first, like a smartphone without a frontside camera and with a near-full-coverage front display. The back was silver, with two camera lenses and an LED flash - also, no buttons appeared on the sides, the top, or the bottom.

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It seems that Vivo is really into pushing the boundaries of smartphone design that you have to wonder if it’s making any profits from them. The Vivo NEX S was an interesting oddity at best and while the NEX Dual Display Edition is arguably more practical, it is also more expensive. The Chinese company doesn’t seem to be stopping there either because based on one of the most prominent leaksters on the Internet, Vivo is working on a “Waterdrop” phone that will “subvert people’s past perception of smartphones.”

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Chinese OEMs, more than their bigger global counterparts, have been more courageous in thinking outside the box to solve the age-old problem of notches. Vivo, in particular, has now tried two different solutions. Following the interesting but largely impractical Vivo NEX S and its rising and sinking front camera, the company put out the even more interesting Vivo NEX Dual Display Edition. But while there might be some who’d want a taste of that dual screen goodness, not everyone might be able to afford it. Fortunately, a potentially cheaper version is on its way.

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Some say that innovation isn’t a matter of creating something completely original because almost nothing these days is. Instead, it’s about taking existing things and mixing them together in a new and exciting way. If that’s true, then the Vivo NEX Dual Display Edition, the mouthful formal name of what most will probably simply call the Vivo NEX 2, is perhaps one of the most innovative smartphones these years. Or at least that’s the claim that we’re now putting to the test.

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What’s next for NEX? After earning the distinction of having the world’s first elevating front camera, Vivo has decided to turn what could have been a one-off name into a new line representing its innovation and, to some extent, its imagination. That elevating camera, however, didn’t turn out so well, commercially speaking. It cut too many corners in favor of that feature that, it turned out, few actually used. With the Vivo NEX Dual Display Edition, the company isn’t pulling any punches and while it effectively removed the front-facing camera, it has come up with a lot more to make up for it.

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There’s no longer any doubt about it. Perhaps seeing there’s no point to all the secrecy in the face of an overabundance of leaks, Vivo itself has pretty much confirmed what’s next for the NEX. The original was designed to be a head-turning preview of what’s possible for smartphones when you think outside of the box. That may not have turned out so well commercially but that’s not stopping the Chinese company from trying. So yes, the NEX 2 will have two screens and Vivo doesn’t care whether it makes sense or not.

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It seems that Vivo is quite ready to turn its back on the feature it brought to life so briefly. The next phone that will be under the NEX brand isn’t going to have its elevating camera and it seems that the company may have not devoted more resources to iterate and improve on that idea. That said, the NEX 2 could still be a futuristic smartphone nonetheless, and not just because of the second screen on its back.

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Perhaps Vivo, and OPPO, jumped the gun too soon. Although much talked about, no one else decided to follow in their footsteps to make elevating cameras a thing. Others have gone a different route to solve the notch problem and now it seems Vivo has changed directions as well. That’s because the successor of the world first elevating camera smartphone won’t have an elevating camera. It will have a second screen on its back instead.

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This year has seen a number of unconventional smartphones but few can probably outdo the bezel-less, notch-less smartphones with elevating cameras. Vivo blazed the trail with its Apex prototype that it said wouldn’t be commercialized. A few months later, the Vivo NEX S launched with almost exactly the same features as the prototype. But is the NEX S all flair and no substance? Is it just a smartphone with a pretty face and a gimmick but nothing more? We take a hard good luck at the Vivo NEX S to bring you the answers.

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The Vivo V11 was revealed this week with a new sort of notch on its face and an in-display fingerprint sensor. It has a full-screen display and looks, by all accounts, to be a high-priced piece of hardware. But it's not. It's released by Vivo, a company that's a very close relative to two other companies with the same parent: OPPO and OnePlus.*

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