Goodbye screen notch, it’s been nice knowing you. The Vivo Nex , with its pop-up selfie camera and all screen experience, proves you don’t need ape the iPhone X’s ($1,000 at Cricket Wireless) design to stand out, and that Chinese phone makers can indeed innovate.
Vivo’s Nex demonstrates everything a phone of the future can be. It starts with a bezel-less 6.59-inch Super AMOLED display featuring a full HD+ resolution of 2,136 x 1,080 pixels. There’s no front speaker grille, which gives it a clean, all screen look. The fingerprint reader is integrated into the screen, and a powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor powers the phone.
The magic of the Vivo Nex comes from its pop-up selfie camera.
James Martin/CNET
The all-screen, no-notch Nex is amazing to look at, and it’s the perfect conversation starter. I’ve had plenty of people marvel at the pop-up camera, though the first question is usually almost always, “Will it break?” The answer is no, it won’t, but more on that later.
The phone’s major drawbacks are the terribly unwieldy iOS clone of an operating system and the fact that the Nex is currently limited to a few countries, besides China, the Nex will be available in Russia, India, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan soon, but no word on when, or even if, it will head west. The Nex costs 3,898 Chinese yuan, which converts to $585, £445 and AU$790.
That isn’t cheap, but alongside the Oppo Find X , the Vivo Nex demonstrates what futuristic phones can look like, by moving the camera and speaker grille to other parts of the phone. If you can get your hands on the Vivo Nex and want to stand out from the crowd, it’s a worthy purchase, though not at all a mainstream device. So make sure the Nex will work with your carrier bands before buying it and adding your SIM.
The Vivo Nex’s cutting-edge design is also clever
Companies that make “all-screen” phones have a problem: where do you put the front-facing camera, speaker grille and other sensors you need to make a phone work?
Vivo’s solution is to strip them out entirely, which makes for a phone face that’s over 91 percent screen.
Look ma, no notch!
James Martin/CNET
The highlight of the phone, the 8-megapixel selfie camera lives inside the phone body and pops up when you take a selfie. The mechanism is sturdy and likely unlikely to break. I tested it carefully at first before applying more force, and I’m confident that it’s anything but flimsy. The eject mechanism is also pretty strong too, enough to keep push away my finger that was purposely blocking it with some strength. When you switch from the rear dual-cameras to the front pop-up selfie, the switching speed is only slower by about half a second at most compared to the iPhone X.
Another cool piece of engineering is the underscreen fingerprint sensor. Another Vivo phone, the Vivo X21 ($568 at Amazon.com), has this, too, and honestly, I wasn’t too impressed. It was slower than an actual physical scanner, and was sometimes frustrating to use. However, the Nex features the third-generation Synaptics scanner, which registers my prints almost immediately, a definite improvement.
While the X21 had face unlocking to help with the fingerprint unlock, the option isn’t available on the Nex, since the selfie camera is hidden away. But the in-screen fingerprint reader is fast enough.
To really cement the all-screen experience, Vivo also took away the Nex’s front-firing speakers. Instead, it uses the screen as a speaker when you’re taking calls through the use of a linear vibrator, which basically transmits the sound to the frame of the phone that’s relayed through the screen. This tech is similar to Xiaomi ‘s Mi Mix 2 ($396 at Amazon.com), but plays out better on the Vivo Nex. Unlike the Mi Mix 2, the Nex doesn’t broadcast your audio to everyone within hearing range. Regular music and video playback uses a bottom-firing speaker instead.
The trade-off for having a motorized camera is a phone that’s heavier than normal: almost 200 grams, or 7 ounces. It feels kinda clunky, and friends who checked out the phone also commented on the weight.
