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Don’t like the vivo Apex pop-up selfie cam? You might have a choice
- A new leaked image suggests the vivo Apex (or vivo Nex) will have at least two variants: with or without the pop-up selfie cam.
- If the rumor is correct, the variant without the selfie cam will move the front-facing camera to the chin of the device.
- This would appease people who don’t like the pop-up cam, but would force them to sacrifice screen space.
One of the most exciting things to come out of Mobile World Congress 2018 was the vivo Apex: a flagship smartphone prototype with an underglass fingerprint reader and an innovative pop-up selfie camera to accommodate the notch-less all-screen display.
After making waves at MWC 2018, vivo announced that the vivo Apex would see a public release, and later announced a June 12 launch date in China.
While many Android enthusiasts are excited by the prospect of a phone that’s almost entirely screen, some detractors called foul on the pop-up selfie cam. The most frequent criticism is that the pop-up mechanism will likely break easily.
Vivo might be listening to these naysayers, as a new rumor just popped up (see what I did there?) that the vivo Apex (or vivo Nex, as it might be called when it hits shelves) might come in two different variants: one with the pop-up selfie cam, and another with a selfie camera hidden in the bottom chin. The leaked info comes via Gizmo China.
This wouldn’t be the first smartphone to flip the selfie camera from the top of the phone to the bottom; the Xiaomi Mi Mix, for example, featured the same design element in 2016. However, the leaked image below of the vivo Apex/Nex shows a much smaller chin than other devices with a bottom selfie cam:
Theoretically, since the selfie camera is on the bottom right of the phone, you could simply flip the device 180 degrees to get the same effect as you would if it was at the top left. Here’s the image above upside down to show what I mean:
While the novelty of having a pop-up selfie cam is probably more exciting than a chin camera, it is pretty neat that vivo is trying to make the Apex/Nex the phone with the features that everyone wants. It’s also nice to know that vivo is searching for truly innovative solutions to the notch problem, rather than throwing it in and claiming that it didn’t steal the idea from the iPhone X.
You can look forward to vivo announcing the Apex/Nex in a few weeks!
NEXT: Vivo’s APEX concept phone goes where no phone has before