For the past few years, Vivo has been showcasing its Apex concept phones to the public, giving them a glimpse of what the current state of technology has to offer. This year is no different, as today the company has officially unveiled its next-generation of Apex concept phone, the Apex 2020. Although the announcement was slated during the Mobile World Congress, the same got canceled, taking into account the coronavirus outbreak, causing a lot of smartphone manufacturers to come up with their announcements individually. Let’s dive deeper and check out the concept design in detail.
To give you some background, the previous Apex concept models built upon a full-screen display, with the 2018 model featuring a retractable camera module, and the 2019 one tweaking it and getting rid of the different buttons and ports. With the 2020 Apex concept phone, the company has gone a step ahead and introduced a 6.45-inch waterfall display with 120-degree curved edges that wrap around the edge. What’s even interesting about this display is that, unlike the company’s previous approaches, where it used a retractable module or a hole-punch cutout to house the front-facing camera, the 2020 model rather relies on an in-display (or under-glass) camera, eliminating the need for the notch, hole-punch, or a retractable hardware. Thus, giving the display a seamless look.
Moving to the cameras, with the Apex 2020, Vivo is introducing what it calls ‘continuous optical zoom’. Basically, the camera incorporates four-group lens combination — with two groups fixed and two groups movable — that aid with better focusing and zooming and offers between 5-7.5x optical zoom. Moreover, the camera also comes with gimbal-like video stabilization, which according to Vivo, is around 200% more effective at stabilization than the traditional OIS.
Another noteworthy change on the Apex 2020 is the inclusion of 60W wireless charging support that Vivo says can charge a 2000mAh battery in just 20 minutes. While it sounds intriguing as a concept, it would be interesting to see if and how Vivo manages to incorporate this battery tech or some of the other tech on the Apex 2020, for that matter, into a package that would come to the masses.