Gadgetory

just when you thought there couldn't be a brand new smartphone form-factor a new take we talked so much recently about these folding devices and of course we've talked so much as well about notches old punches what is the futuristic smartphone well vivo they're they're taking another shot at it with this new concept device they're not selling this thing right now but who knows it could be an indication into an eventual product that they do sell so what's special about the apex well they got rid of buttons there's no mechanical buttons no clicking buttons there are instead capacitive buttons touch areas on the side of the device that you can tap it'll read your your finger like any capacitive button you're used to and then that will be your input method but the other thing is there's no ports either no holes there's not a front-facing camera at all in insight for me the front-facing camera not a major thing that I'm engaging with so I've talked before about the potential for a smart phone option that just does away with the front-facing camera all together and that's what they've done here in the form of the apex 2019 no front-facing camera no charge port as well with the apex you've got some pins on the back magnetic pins similar to like a MagSafe connector this little cable will find the correct position on the back of the device in order to charge it up and give you more speed than what wireless charging is capable of that said I still don't really understand why it wasn't just wireless charging or if this even will have wireless charging again it's just a concept at this particular point in time another kind of interesting aspect of this device is how it deals with sound what they've done here is they've used some under display technology to have audio transmitted through the glass of the display the phone as you see here sounds from nothing here in Distortion probably the most exciting thing for me based on what I've seen so far is the fingerprint scanner vivos doing something different what they're showing off is a full screen fingerprint scanner so you can touch your thumb to any spot on the screen without any kind of thought now that is currently one of the downsides of the in display fingerprint scanner with this concept phone here instead you don't even think about it you tap anywhere on the display you pick it up you tap anywhere on the display and it will read the fingerprint and unlock so that's a fairly big difference in how you interact with the device and how you unlock it and this is important because of course throughout the day you unlock your device a ton now in terms of specs they're talking about potentially a Snapdragon 855 up to 12 gigabytes of RAM and 512 gigabytes of storage so it's obviously targeted as a flagship device if it does eventually launch in this format you can expect it to have a flagship price to go with it we've seen these motorized pop up cameras and the comments section of these videos is always full of people that are apprehensive about the potential for a breakdown the potential for water damage but by doing away with anything like that without any front facing camera mechanism you now have this solid body this solid device which should be less susceptible to the potential drawbacks with the motorized components we've seen up until this point in an era where manufacturers are already eliminating ports things like headphone jacks and so on are you ready for this kind of concept are you ready to do away with ports in general it does seem that buttons are evaporating in our lives or at least their importance is being diminished via software this is the natural progression I'm just not sure that we're there yet the big question here is the front-facing camera or lack thereof is that is that something you're prepared to live with or do you need a solution for a front-facing camera must there be one in a smart phone for you to consider purchasing it or could you live a lot without a selfie cam do you need the selfies we talked about this idea of no front-facing camera giving you a full screen display and now we might potentially have it that's kind of exciting though I'm not so certain that everyone's ready for it