I love concept smartphones. Even if some of them are ridiculous, even if some of them are impractical, even if some of them never see the light of day. I love them because it’s a very rare glance into the future of the device we’re most dependent on every day. And today, we came across reports that Vivo’s next concept smartphone, the Apex 2020, will be launching at the end of this week.
Vivo made an official post on Weibo today announcing that the company will be unveiling their much anticipated Apex 2020 concept smartphone on the 28th of February 2020, which is this Friday in case you forgot to pack your calendar.
Now, this smartphone has been highly anticipated for a while now. In fact, most of us were expecting to see it around MWC2020, but then we all know what happened to that event. And thanks to Alex who’s in Barcelona now for an event that I’m not sure if I’m able to talk about just yet, we also know that Vivo were indeed planning to go big with their Apex launch with all the banners for their new device all over the airport.
While previous generations of the Apex device have always been interesting, it appears that this Apex 2020 could be one of the tamest yet. Apex 2019 saw the device remove all its buttons, holes and cutouts, then encase the back of the handset with this translucent “G2 curved surface” seamless slab of glass that felt nothing short of flawless. And the one before that, well that’s one of the first motorised camera smartphones we ever saw.
That being said, tame doesn’t always have a bad connotation. From the promotional images, it seems clear that the device has a big emphasis on the camera as the company is touting something along the lines of a 48MP “gimbal” camera. Seems like it would take smartphone stabilisation to the next level, which is always something that gets me going.
Of course, image stabilisation (optical or electronic) isn’t particularly new technology, and we’ve seen some truly next-level stuff from companies like GoPro with the Hero 8. So, it will be quite interesting to see where Vivo takes this.
Judging from the camera module design and the ads, it looks like the phone could also feature some kind of periscope optical zooming capabilities. Something along the lines of a 5-7.5x optical zoom plus the square camera lens setup does seem very periscope-y, which is always exciting.
In any case, everything should be revealed by the end of this week so you can leave your thoughts on what you think the next Apex will be about in the comments below and we’ll see who got it right when the handset launches on Friday.
