vivo Nex Dual Display Edition has a crazy rear screen and 10GB of RAM

We saw leaked images of a supposed dual-screen vivo smartphone last month, but the Chinese brand has finally announced the device at a launch event in Shanghai today.

The vivo Nex Dual Display Edition indeed packs two screens, featuring a virtually bezel-less 6.39-inch OLED screen (2,340 x 1,080) on the front and a 5.49-inch OLED display (1,920 x 1,080) on the back.

The rear-mounted OLED panel serves a couple of purposes. The main one is to allow users to take selfies – there’s no front-facing camera, so the triple-camera setup on the back doubles as a selfie cam. The rear screen is also used for a couple of software features – Mirror Mode and Pose Director. The latter displays a pose you want to imitate, if that’s your thing. vivo also talked about using the secondary screen to control games you’re playing on the main screen, though we assume this will require game developers to adapt their games for the device.

A set of LEDs run around the circular camera module. Called Lunar Ring, this feature serves as a notification light, and also as a diffuse flash for selfies.

Thanks to this arrangement, you don’t need a front-facing camera, allowing you to simply take selfies with the rear camera trio. And it’s a pretty odd, humped setup, consisting of a 12MP f/1.79 main camera, a 2MP snapper (presumably for depth effects), and a time-of-flight (TOF) sensor for 3D/AR effects.

We’ve previously seen the latter sensor on the OPPO R17 Pro, where it was used to quickly 3D-scan objects and subjects. Unfortunately, our own Lanh Nguyen felt it wasn’t “particularly useful” and was “very buggy.” Hopefully vivo makes better use of the sensor…

You can also expect plenty of camera features, including AI scene recognition, portrait mode, “face shaping”, and AI portrait framing. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if vivo added the TOF sensor purely for a more advanced beauty mode and better filters.

In any case, the vivo Nex Dual Display Edition is pretty stacked when it comes to core specs. There’s a Snapdragon 845 chipset, 10GB of RAM, 128GB of fixed storage, a 3,500mAh battery, and an in-display fingerprint scanner. The last feature is a pretty noteworthy inclusion for a phone with two screens, owing to the complexity of a dual-screen phone in the first place.

vivo tends to make affordable devices, but the new Nex’s specs and, in particular, secondary screen on the back cost a premium. It’s not as bad as we were expecting though: 4,998 yuan, or the equivalent of $725. The phone will go on sale from December 29 in China, with pre-orders starting today. No word yet on international availability or pricing.

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Stay tuned for our vivo Nex Dual Display Edition hands-on, coming over the next few hours, and let us know what you think!