Vivo held in Hong Kong the day past a media fingers-on session for its Apex 2019 concept telephone that first made news in January to have no bodily buttons, ports, or “holes” (which means speaker grilles or earpiece) any type. The concept becomes to reap a “minimalistic” tool that is completely uninterrupted through transferring elements, protrusions, or indentations so that it could be one easy, unibody piece.
Due to the wildly competitive nature of the Chinese cellphone market, a smaller company named Meizu tried to borrow some of Vivo’s thunder by using dashing to release a similar “hole-much less” device. I tested it thoroughly and found it to be a concept that became too radical for its own good.
After testing Vivo’s Apex 2019 for an hour, I can say the identical troubles that struck me with Meizu’s tool might still have prevented the Apex 2019 had I ever used it completely time. Chief amongst those is that Vivo’s smartphone, like Meizu’s tool, can best make a cellular connection through e-SIM because of the shortage of a physical SIM card slot. The former tech isn’t always even near being geared up for mainstream adoption.
Another problem I had with this button-less layout was that the contact/stress-sensitive capacitive facet panels were impossible to find via touch (remember, those telephones are entirely smooth on the perimeters), and I can’t see myself ever wanting to surrender the ease of being able to adjust the extent without difficulty in favor of having a phone that’s barely “smoother” alongside the edges.
But right here’s the issue: Vivo understands this. Unlike Meizu, which took its idea phone to the crowdfunding degree (and flopping), executives at Vivo told the media that the day past the device was just a concept to expose the future era and may not be released to the general public.
Of the new tech, the one that inspired me most is that the whole display of the Apex 2019 is a fingerprint reader, which means a consumer can unlock the tool by pressing their thumb on any part of the display screen. This is done via implanting an optical sensor under the whole display panel of the idea smartphone, a large improvement over the present-day in-screen fingerprint scanning tech that calls for finger placement on a selected–and small–portion of the screen, which can be difficult to locate at instances. I’m presently checking out the Samsung Galaxy S10 with such a scanner, and I can say it took me days to discover ways to unlock the telephone while not finding the blind spot.
It should not be sudden that Vivo is the only one to introduce this stepped-forward tech because the Shenzhen-centered enterprise has become the pioneer of the in-show fingerprint scanner movement. It has continued to evolve the tech at a tempo that can best be defined as “China speed.” When I examined the first Vivo device with an in-display fingerprint scanner just ten months ago, I discovered the tech had a combined bag that always failed to paintings. Three months later, Vivo had improved it to the degree that I had no problems with the scanner. And now, the Apex 2019 takes it to its no-compromise maximum capacity.
Vivo did say that embedding an optical sensor below the entire display panel drives up production prices drastically, so don’t expect to peer this all-display screen fingerprint scanner tech “honestly soon.” But this is a Chinese smartphone emblem we are speaking about. The fee at which they work and the cut-throat aggressive marketplace have me confident that this tech will be used in an extensively launched Vivo flagship in the autumn of 2019.
