Review

Everything You Should Know About VIVO NEX

On the evening of June 12, VIVO officially released the much-talked and much-awaited flagship named the NEX. The VIVO NEX is the mass production version of the VIVO APEX, a concept machine displayed on MWC at the end of February of this year. It incorporates many new technologies in one. Let’s learn everything about it.

The VIVO NEX uses the so-called ‘Ultra FullView Display’ design, which removes the big bangs that many people don’t like and has a higher face value. Actually, the phone is packed with a 6.59-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 2316×1080 and a ratio of 19.3:9. It’s equivalent to a traditional 5.68-inch phone. At the same time, it combines an ultra-narrow frame at 1.71mm on the left and right, at 2.16mm on the top, and at 5.08mm on the bottom. The screen occupation ratio reached the highest 91.24% in the industry, and it also provides special custom touch coating on the screen.

In order to achieve a full screen without fringe, the VIVO NEX has adopted a new handset design called ‘Comprehensive screen sounding technology’, which uses a micro-vibration unit to drive the screen to vibrate, taking into account the ultra-narrow frame and good sense of hearing.

At the same time, there are ‘hidden sensing elements.’ VIVO has originally developed a ray data compensation algorithm that hides the light sensor at the bottom of the screen to achieve a light under the screen. With the innovative design of the fuselage structure and used processes, the micro-slit infrared is also hidden at the top of the screen.

The next innovation refers to the lifting design of the 8MP front camera. When entering the self-timer interface, the camera will automatically pop-up. When closing the app, it will automatically drop and hide. For this reason, an extremely precise micro-stepping motor is used internally, with an independent drive IC and precision control algorithm. It accurately controls the lifting stroke.

VIVO claims that it has spent two years studying screen fingerprints. There have been two on-screen smartphones in face of the VIVO X20 Plus UD and VIVO X21 UD. The NEX is already the third generation. The components are smaller, the performance is stronger, the fingerprint image accuracy is improved by 50%, and the unlocking speed is improved by 10%.

The VIVO NEX has two kinds of color matching (Star Diamond Black / Ruby Red), which are processed by different special technologies. The first is the use of holographic illusion technology, while the second is the use of microcrystalline crystal Ruby technology.

AI is there as well. The company has penetrated AI into all levels of the system, from the application to the icon, from the voice to the camera. It runs on Funtouch OS 4 operating system based on Android 8.1.

Newly-designed Energy UI and new AI dynamic icons: Not only have the corresponding dynamic display, but also the icon color change function, the system will intelligently recognize the warm and cold tone of the wallpaper, and automatically adjust the visual style of the icons.

New Jovi voice function: Deep coverage system function and high-frequency third-party applications. The traditional touch operation can be realized by voice. It supports 20 high-frequency scenes and 600 core functions.

Complex Commands: Jovi integrates deep natural language understanding technology to accurately extract useful information from natural language, understand complex logic relationships, and easily deal with complex sentences such as complex WeChat operations.

Jovi Command Teaching and Plaza: Users can also continue to educate Jovi. Lazy people can also study at Jovi Square. In the future, hundreds of millions of users will share teaching orders. The popular instruction will be free to add default features.

AI independent button: the NEX has a Jovi AI independent button on the side of the camera body. A long press to wake up Jovi can directly talk and use more functions.

AI Wisdom: Full coverage of Encyclopedia, Shopping, Translation, Scanning, Screen Recognition, etc. Pressing the AI independent button on any application, such as camera, webpage, chat, and other, Jovi will immediately respond.

AI scene recognition: not only can identify night scenes, jitter and backlight scenes, adjust the photo effects, but also identify the contents of photos, such as portraits, food, flowers, and make further optimization.

AI filter: According to the result of scene recognition, the most suitable stylized filter is recommended.

AI portrait composition: automatically matches the best composition method according to the content of the shot, guiding the user to move the phone and optimizing the composition.

AI backlight photo: dynamic range of up to 11.3eV, also equipped with intelligent frame selection technology for the first time. According to the scene changes, intelligently selects the number of composite photos, enhances the speed and effect of the backlight mode in different scenes.

AI Make-up: Self-timer is the traditional strength of VIVO, and AI Make-up on NEX can provide excellent beauty effect.

AI Lab: VIVO has established AI joint laboratories with partners such as NetEase, Gold, Baidu, Infofly, Ant Financial, and others to conduct in-depth cooperation on AI algorithms and data, including speech recognition, machine vision, and semantics understanding, knowledge maps and other technical ecosystems. All these technologies have been integrated into Jovi.

As for the camera, the VIVO NEX comes with Sony’s new generation of IMX363 sensor. Thus, there is a dual-core 12MP sensor (24 million photosensitive units) with a 1.4-micron large pixel size, a f/1.8 large aperture, high-precision four-axis OIS support, P3 color gamut camera and P3 color gamut screen display, supplemented by a 6P lens, sapphire glass surface, and other goodies.

The secondary camera comes with only a 5MP resolution and an aperture of f/2.4.

As assumed, there are two variants in terms of hardware. The VIVO NEX is packed with a Snapdragon 710 chip initially found on the Xiaomi Mi 8 SE and a Snapdragon 845 seen on top-end models. The chips are paired with an 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a 4000mAh battery.

In terms of games, a new VIVO game engine was introduced. VIVO’s first cooperation with Tencent, Netease, and Epic Unreal Engine Technology reached the highest level and achieved an engine-level SDK optimization.

VIVO has been always concerned with Hi-Fi audio performance. Three op amp, as well as an operational amplifier integrated matrix encapsulation SIP package, are combined into one. The theoretical dynamic range is 130dB and the distortion is -115dB.

What’s commendable is that the VIVO NEX also specifically introduces HP UE technology to strengthen the phone features, including:

The layout of the antenna is redesigned to effectively avoid the well-known death grip.
It is equipped with High Power UE terminal for a stronger signal penetration and a greater signal coverage.
The new 4×4 antenna scheme supports high-order diversity HORxD, which can achieve multi-antenna reception and improve signal reception quality under hand-held conditions.

In order to cope with a large number of high-end components, the NEX is also equipped with a ‘zero-sense cooling system,’ which is claimed to achieve a revolutionary temperature rise control.

The Standard Edition costs 3898 yuan, while the Ultimate model comes at 4498/4998 yuan. They will go on sale on June 23.

VIVO NEX Gallery