Vivo unveiled a rather interesting concept at the Mobile World Congress 2018 last month called the Vivo Apex. The handset has a bezel-less display in the true essence of the word as it maximizes screen real estate by relying on an in-display fingerprint sensor and a front-facing camera that actually pops up from the top bezel. The company didn’t say anything about availability at that time but a new report claims that Vivo might release the Apex in the second half of this year.
After first unveiling it in Barcelona, Vivo has now unveiled its Apex concept smartphone in China where it reportedly revealed more details about the device. It’s powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 845 processor but it’s unclear what the RAM and storage options are. Vivo is yet to provide information about the camera configurations and the battery capacity as well.
It did reveal that the Vivo Apex has a 5.99 inch OLED display with a very impressive screen-to-body ratio of 91 percent. The device also has a fingerprint sensor integrated into the display itself, a technology that Vivo has already commercialized with another smartphone.
The pop up selfie camera is another interesting thing about this concept and Vivo says that it only needs 0.8 seconds to surface the front camera. However, Essential owns a patent on this implementation of a front camera, so it remains to be seen if there’s going to be a patent dispute between the two companies over this.
Vivo has reportedly revealed at its event in China that it’s going to start mass production of this device in mid-2018 which suggests that it might hit the market at some point in the second half of this year.