Daily Authority: 📁 X marks the Fold

🥪🧀 Good morning! Paula told me it’s National Grilled Cheese Day, and that is cause for a tasty celebration!

X Fold: Best non-Samsung?

The vivo X Fold marks the second foldable under the umbrella of BBK Electronics, following the OPPO Find N. It also matches the Find N by copying the Galaxy Z Fold 3 design with the outer display, opening to the inner larger pad-style display.

It does notch a few firsts for the foldable space:

• This is the first foldable to have two fingerprint sensors. Both are ultrasonic in-display options versus side fingerprint scanners in the power button.
• It also packs Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset.
• There’s not-new ultra-thin glass to protect the internal display, like Samsung, but the X Fold has certification that it can survive 300,000 folds, which is 100k more than the Find N.
• And as far as I can tell, it’s the first foldable with an alert/mute slider, probably borrowed from the OnePlus team!
• Vivo’s first foldable also brings a pretty familiar rear camera setup to last year’s X70 Pro Plus, featuring a 50MP main shooter (Samsung GN5), 48MP ultrawide lens (114-degree field-of-view), a 12MP 2x telephoto lens (IMX663), and an 8MP 5x periscope camera.

Foldable design, kitchen-sink specs:

• Much like the HUAWEI Mate X2 and the OPPO Find N, the X Fold also adopted a water-drop hinge design.
• That’s the style that attempts to offer a gapless fold, while also minimizing the panel crease sometimes visible in foldables.
• vivo also added a metal plate that pushes up against the flexible panel to attempt to smooth out the crease even further.
• As to what those screens are, there’s a fairly normal-looking outer screen, a 6.53-inch FHD+ 120Hz OLED panel, which is a little wider than the Fold 3, and the inner display’s an 8.03-inch 120Hz LTPO OLED panel.
• The cameras are geared to be flagship-level too, packing ZEISS branding in a quad setup like last year’s X70 Pro Plus: 50MP main camera, an 8MP 5x periscope zoom camera, a 12MP 2x telephoto, and a 48MP 114-degree ultrawide lens as well.
• There are also two 12MP punch-hole selfies cameras, one on each display.
• It’s a bit of a tech beast, with no compromises on cameras and display, but no IP rating, and will it emerge outside of China, or is this another China-only release?

I checked in with our regular vivo reviewer Hadlee Simons to get some thoughts on where it fits. Here’s what he wrote for Daily Authority readers:

• The vivo X Fold compares pretty favorably to the Z Fold 3, and you could argue that it might be the best rival to Samsung’s device yet.
• It has a better camera system on paper (derived from its traditional flagships), under-display fingerprint scanners on both screens (although side fingerprint scanners are great too), and even an alert slider for the first time on a foldable. You’re also getting faster charging and a more sensible external display.
• Samsung still rules the roost for durability. Sure, the vivo device has ultra-thin glass (UTG) on the inside screen too, but Samsung has improved display durability dramatically, regardless of UTG, to the point of being able to use an S Pen, plus Samsung has the all-important IP rating.
• The lack of water resistance is also notable on the vivo device compared to Samsung’s foldable.
• Neither have dust resistance though, which is what I’d rather see next.
• As for China-only: vivo told us last month that there were no plans “at the moment” for a global release, though we have heard a report of an Indian launch being on the cards. Don’t hold your breath though!

Roundup

👍 Netflix now lets you give two thumbs up for stuff you really like (Android Authority).

👎 Google is hounding scammers who use its services: One guy who ran a vastly nefarious fake dog conspiracy apparently cost Google $75,000 to investigate. Google warns of taking extra precautions around adopting a dog! (Android Authority).

👉 More OnePlus 10R specs released: A MediaTek Dimensity 8100 SoC will power this Indian audience release (Android Authority).

🍎 Apple is making the iPhone 13 in India: Here’s why everyone should care (Android Authority).

🤔 A new phone like the BlackBerry Key 2 could be on the way via Unihertz (Android Authority).

🍎 Maybe this is Apple’s rumored 35W dual USB-C port charger, apparently shown in these leaks, and which may have very briefly appeared in documents on Apple’s website. As someone joked, you know it’s legit when Apple’s documentation said “USB-C cable not included” (MacRumors).

💻 PC sales are beginning to taper off as we recover from the pandemic: Chromebooks slide, but “higher-end consumer demand has held up.” (The Verge).

🕹 Panic Playdate is getting closer: This early hands-on says it “feels like a delightful bizarro Nintendo Game & Watch” (CNET).

🧶 Over 14,000 Etsy sellers are going on strike to protest increased transaction fees (TechCrunch).

🔋 Honda plans to invest $40 billion on EVs and launch 30 models by 2030 (Engadget).

🎶 YouTube’s Coachella livestream extravaganza is back starting this weekend (blog.youtube).

🚀 Behold: the worst rocket video of all time? A company that aims to race SpaceX to Mars uploaded a video of a rocket test that looks so dangerous, there’s hundreds of comments like, “We knew better as untrained college students” (Ars Technica).

🧠 “Scientists, what are the biggest unknowns within your respective fields??” (r/asksciencediscussion).

Chart Tuesday

Astronomers are apparently intrigued by dramatic temperature changes on deeply cold Neptune, and there’s a chart to prove it:

• In short, what you see are thermal images taken of Neptune over the years. (Brighter is warmer and darker is colder.)
• But time is slow on Neptune: a season lasts 40 years. And while we’ve been watching from Earth, it’s been summer, so naturally, some warming would be expected.
• Instead, Neptune has cooled: The globally averaged temperature of Neptune dropped by 8°C between 2003 and 2018, other than at the southern pole, to as low as minus 117°C.
• “This change was unexpected,” says Michael Roman, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Leicester, UK, and lead author of a study published this week in The Planetary Science Journal. “Since we have been observing Neptune during its early southern summer, we expected temperatures to be slowly growing warmer, not colder.”
• “The atmosphere appears more complicated than we had naively assumed, which, unsurprisingly, seems to be a general lesson that nature teaches scientists again and again,” says Roman.

Warmly,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.