Gadgetory

my goodness ladies and gentlemen gotta be one of the most anticipated videos that I could possibly make in front of me today the vivo apex there's like everything that happened before this and then what will come after ambition boiled down into something you can hold smartphone design is dead we've talked a lot about differentiation in the space especially in the Android world that one's pretty good that one's pretty good like which one every single manufacturer looked at this thing and realized immediately how do we get there they started working the next day this screen to body ratio thing for people like you that's the challenge that's I guess for a smartphone maker the reason to be in this business now but from a manufacturing standpoint it's a super difficult problem to approach and I hit this button you get to see it for yourself what this future looks like it's not completely bezel asst there's a tiny little bit of a chin over there 1.8 millimeters on the top as well as the sides and 4.3 millimeters on a little tiny chin here there's no goatee when the people from vivo brought it over there like Nenana the goal is zero bezel first of all in order to achieve this there's a whole different manufacturing process necessary which is part of the reason why you can't buy this phone right now what it would cost to put this thing together is beyond what normal people will be willing to pay for a phone at least right now the goal is to make the bezel identical the whole way around if you show this thing to me when I was oh I don't know 15 years old I'd be like that man is living in the future so this particular design introduces all kinds of problems where's the front-facing camera where are the proximity sensors how do you unlock the device but believe it or not they're here in the function surprisingly well so first off let's talk about this front-facing camera it doesn't exist on the bezel at all it's up here on the top and it's recessed it's kind of nice to look at a display and not stare at a camera so I just I just think the hidden camera thing has some positive attributes for people who might be a little bit sensitive to having a lens facing them all the time all right privacy concerns whatever it's a full-on motor that will push this camera up I'm going to show you how it works lift off baby and hey everyone can say hi now there we go hey hey Kirk say what's up BAM special it's unprecedented the beard hair test I understand some of the apprehension about this particular decision it's moving parts it could possibly fail the level of concern that you have it almost directly maps to how important selfies or videoconferencing is to you personally if you're that kind of person is using the front-facing camera I'm gonna go with you you have a valid concern there would be some serious engineering necessary to make that motorized front-facing camera lasts for five thousand ten thousand a hundred thousand actuations some other interesting things about the design here power switch is actually it's over here it's where your finger lands it's not where your thumb is I do like this round button actually it's very distinctive you know right away when you're on it you probably notice down here on the bottom bar we have this fingerprint indicator this is a demo you can increase the security level by requiring two thumb prints instead of one to unlock the device I'll show you that in a moment so if I bring up the test you're gonna see what the potential lock screen would look like and in this case it's asking me to authenticate to fingerprints at the same time now this is a possibility because of the size of the sensor area now when these began to emerge the size of that area was much smaller the technology adjusts you watch this like that's the magic right there I'm gonna delete fingerprint okay no more fingerprint I got a register I'm gonna do a single fingerprint registration this is the way I think most people will use this so you press hard in this location over here and it grabs a little bit and then again and then again so now I back out and I go to the authentication test again according to vivo the goal for the fingerprint scanner is to eventually be the entire screen oh my goodness you're just not even thinking about it bam bam ban here we go single fingerprint boom done right boots up boom done alright I have to sit when I saw this emerged on the web I was very skeptical and now having tried it myself I had to say I think it exceeds my expectations even though it's a little bit slow works surprisingly well on a product that's just a concept now there are some security disadvantages to an optical fingerprint sensor you are correct Apple is but it made a huge deal of this face ID thing multiple points it's a big topic of conversation right now and it's true optical scanners might not be the absolute most secure method of authentication that said you can always put the old-school pin code in what we're seeing here is sort of an initial stage I expect to see improvement let's get back to the display real quick so why is it so interesting to have a bezel list display as the screens grow if the device grows along with it you end up with these really large objects in your pocket I know that bothers Ryan to no end so the shrinking bezel is an antidote because everybody wants a big screen the goal is around 98% screen to body ratio so when you hold this thing it's basically all screen how impressive this screen to body ratio is how much video you get in such a small form-factor now another thing that kind of surprised me about this device it maintains a headphone jack alongside the USB type-c connector we have a traditional 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and I was like if this is the phone of the future is the headphone jack still a thing I'm not so certain I kind of like it because it gives a real nod to the tech community and the fact that we still value it why I think it makes sense why not it's not doing anything to the form factor it's not making the phone bigger or harder to hold there's a really no downside they do have an OLED panel in here which as far as I'm concerned is the best you can do right now it's a flexible OLED panel because it actually has to be wrapped so that they can get these ultimate slim bezels and beyond that the microchips have to be mounted directly to the flexible circuit in order to fit that's where the complexity comes in how do you manufacture that at scale but what's particularly compelling about this concept is the fact that it works so well this isn't Samsung doing this this is an Apple doing this this is vivo doing this the package functions surprisingly close to something that's finished I came here knowing that I was going to look at something impressive but I have to say as a package deal this thing near has exceeded even that I believe even more now in my original tweet in which I said smartphone design is dead for everybody else in the game it's time to scramble reconfigure throw the design team out the door and figure out how to make a screen that you hold and that you see in the absence of anything else