Vivo Apex 2019: No holes, all screen

In February 2018, China’s Vivo was one of the first companies to show a phone that’s literally all screen on the front — no notches for the selfie camera, thin bezels all around. 

Now, the company has launched a successor to that phone, called the Vivo Apex 2019 — and it takes the same concept to its logical conclusion.

Vivo actually soft-launched the Apex 2019 in January, but the company has now brought the actual device to an event in Hong Kong (via The Verge). 

Vivo’s Apex 2019 has no physical buttons, which have been replaced by pressure sensors which give haptic feedback when you touch them. The standard USB port has been removed and replaced with a Magport: a magnetic connector that clings to the back of the phone to charge it. There’s no SIM card slot — you have to use an eSIM instead. The phone’s screen doesn’t have a notch, and it has a new kind of fingerprint scanner, which lets you unlock the phone by placing a finger anywhere on the screen instead of a designated spot. There’s no speaker grille, either: The sound is delivered by vibrating the screen, a technology used in the original Apex phone as well. Oh, and the entire phone is made out of a single piece of glass. 

In short, the Vivo Apex 2019 is the company’s vision of the future, with tons of new tech thrown in to show that it’s already possible to make a phone without a single hole or button. 

The Apex 2019 isn’t, however, a phone you’ll be buying and actually using. It’s a concept device, and it lacks some very common features, including a selfie camera. The rear camera is a dual, 13/12-megapixel one without flashy new features. The battery has a tiny (for today’s standards) 2,000mAh capacity. 

It’s worth noting that Meizu, another Chinese smartphone maker, recently launched a crowdfunding campaign for a similarly hole-less phone, but the company later said the entire thing was little more than a publicity stunt.

Other specs of note: The Apex 2019 has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 processor, 12GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, 5G connectivity and vapour-chamber cooling. It’s probably waterproof (no ports, remember), but Cnet notes that the company still hasn’t tested this out. 

There’s no word on pricing, and I suspect the Apex 2019 will never be sold in this configuration; instead, the technologies used in the phone will soon start to show up in Vivo’s mass-market phones.