Vivo felt experimental in 2018, so much so that they were the first with a periscope camera on a phone, that inspired the sliders with selfie cameras going up, like the Oppo Find X or Xiaomi Mi Mix 3. Vivo continued the NEX line in December 2018 with the Vivo NEX Dual Display and now we unbox the phone. It’s priced at $725.
This is the first Vivo phone we test and also the first 10 GB RAM phone we play with. It doesn’t have a selfie camera, it doesn’t have a notch and everything comes inside a box with cute 3D effects. Our version is Polar Blue and the box includes accessories like a bumper case, charger, headphones, USB Type-C cable and SIM key.
The charger is a 22.5W unit, which should juice up the device fast. The handset has an aluminum frame and glass at the front, plus glass at the back. Of course, the core of the experience is the set of two screens in the mix: the main 6.39 inch Super AMOLED screen with Full HD+ resolution and 19.5:9 aspect. The back side includes a 5.49 inch Super AMOLED display with 16:9 aspect and Full HD res.
Inside the handset we find a Snapdragon 845 CPU, 10 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage. There’s no microSD slot in the mix, but there’s a 3500 mAh battery to keep the lights on. The fingerprint scanner has been integrated in the screen and there’s also face unlock here of the 3D Kind. On the software front, there’s Android Pie with FunTouch OS.
We’ve got fast charge and on the camera front there’s only a set of triple back cameras, no front shooter. That includes a main 12 MP shooter with F/1.8, OIS, Dual Pixel PDAF and 2 MP depth sensor, plus a third TOF camera. The main cam with 12 MP res is the same one from the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 and ZenFone 5z. A LED flash is also here. In order to swap between screens you can press a side button or do 3 finger swipes on the screen.
It all happens seamlessly. Vivo NEX Dual Display measures 8.1 mm in thickness and weighs 199 grams. It’s rather heavy and massive and I’m not sold on the camera circle on the second screen at the back. Looking forward to test the cameras.
