Vivo APEX surprises us with its retractable camera and on-screen reader

Vivo APEX is the phone that Vivo has brought with a revolutionary concept to the MWCheld in Barcelona. It represents the next evolution regarding cameras, fingerprint readers on the screen and following the “full view” line. A rat prototype to figure out how to get rid of frames forever with a retractable camera on the front.

Vivo APEX, Vivo APEX surprises us with its retractable camera and on-screen reader, Optocrypto

I live APEX

The concept of the phone is called Vivo Apex, and its main feature is what Vivo describes as “Fingerprint scanning technology on a half screen.” The idea here is that instead of placing your finger on an icon the size of a thumbnail to unlock the phone we can do it in a much larger area of the screen.

Vivo APEX, Vivo APEX surprises us with its retractable camera and on-screen reader, Optocrypto

All this is at the service of the war on bevels that almost the entire smartphone industry has declared during the past year. Apex, as a device, is one of the most aggressive expressions of that ideal so far, with almost slight bevels around the three sides of the phone and a larger one, but still thin, on the bottom edge. And, as such, Vivo has needed to find solutions for the kind of features that require bezels to function.

 

The most obvious of these is the selfie camera. Some phone manufacturers have avoided this with notches, others relocating the camera below the screen, so you have to hold the phone upside down. But Apex’s response is witty and friendly: the camera of 8MP is hidden behind the screen and appears as a periscope when necessary. It takes 0.8 seconds to prepare and makes a small buzz. The mechanism that feels solid.

The lack of bevels also means that there is no room for a conventional headset speaker. Live here makes the whole screen vibrate like a speaker: you can still hear phone calls without holding the device in your head.

Apex is purely a concept , a prototype. And Vivo says it has no plans to launch a real product in this particular way. But none of that feels particularly implausible. The fingerprint sensor works, the selfies camera works, the headset and the speaker work. So, that is all in one package with an impressive screen-body ratio.

Source: The Verge