From The Verge: The thing about concept cars is that even though they’re never going to be sold, car makers do actually have to build and present them. Otherwise, who’s going to understand the difference between a true concept and an absent-minded idea? Pity Vivo, then, which had planned to unveil its latest Apex concept phone at Mobile World Congress, but due to the event’s cancellation now has to settle for telling everyone about it in a press release.
Perhaps the Apex 2020 will see the light of day in a future event. For now, though, all I can do is tell you about what Vivo says it was expecting to show off and take the company at its word that the phone does actually exist somewhere in Shenzhen — because if it’s real, it does sound pretty groundbreaking in a few ways.
The Apex 2020’s most prominent visual feature is a 6.45-inch “fullview edgeless” display with 120-degree curved edges that go far beyond what Vivo installed on last year’s Nex 3 flagship. That phone’s “waterfall display” looked dramatic in person with its 88-degree curves, but the Apex 2020’s screen wraps even further around the edges. Like last year’s Apex, the 2020 model has no ports or openings and uses virtual buttons, which didn’t work too well in conceptual form but were much improved on with the commercial Nex 3.
Like other Apex and Nex phones, the 2020 has no notch, which for the first time Vivo is achieving by integrating the 16-megapixel selfie camera right into the display. Vivo says it’s managed to increase the light transmittance of that portion of the screen by six times, while relying on algorithmic optimizations to improve image quality. This is something we’d really want to see in person before passing judgement on — Oppo showed off similar tech last year, but it didn’t look great and is still yet to ship on a consumer device.
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