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Vivo's new Apex 2020 concept phone has an in-display selfie camera
Vivo’s Apex line is the company’s yearly concept phone that showcases its most forward-thinking features. It started with the pop-up selfie camera and in-display fingerprint sensor in the original vivo Apex concept phone we saw at MWC 2018. Last year, we saw a portless and buttonless phone in the Apex line. Now, we have a new concept phone from the brand: the vivo Apex 2020.
Interestingly, this phone takes the two biggest innovations of each of the previous Apex phones and melds them together. The vivo Apex 2020 features an in-display selfie camera, which means there’s no need for a notch, a display cutout, or even a pop-up camera. The lens itself lives under the glass making it so you never need to see it.
The vivo Apex 2020 also has no ports and no buttons. If you want to charge it or transfer data to/from the phone, you’ll need to exclusively use wireless solutions. Thankfully, the vivo Apex 2020 is capable of wireless charging speeds of 60W, which means it takes about one minute to charge each 100mAh of battery. Unfortunately, vivo did not divulge how big the battery capacity is on this new Apex.
The vivo Apex 2020 also has a gimbal-stabilizing main camera system on the rear. This means the whole module, not just the lens, gets stabilized by a mechanical gimbal. According to vivo, this is 200% more effective than traditional OIS we see on most flagship smartphones and will make recording super-smooth video incredibly easy.
Finally, the camera also has a 5x – 7.5x optical zoom. This would mean you could, theoretically, achieve 7.5x zoom without any loss of image quality. That stabilizing gimbal will help keep your shot from getting blurry with that much zoom.
vivo Apex 2020: Shut up and take my money!
This phone sounds very impressive, but don’t get your hopes up about buying the vivo Apex 2020. Although the original Apex became the vivo Nex and did see a commercial release, the 2019 entry in the Apex line only sort of became a real product as the vivo Nex 3. The vivo Apex 2020 physically exists — and we probably would have been able to see it first-hand if MWC wasn’t canceled — but it’s likely the device we see here won’t ever make it to market.
Perhaps, though, the vivo Nex 4 will bring in aspects of this phone. We’ll need to wait and see!