Vivo Nex smartphone review: a Mandarin-speaking assistant, no bezels and no notch

Handset has a pop-up selfie camera, and fingerprint hardware beneath the screen. It has plenty of processing and battery power, although its Mandarin-speaking assistant limits its use outside China

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The Vivo Nex has a dedicated hardware button for its own, Mandarin-speaking digital assistant named Jovi. Photo: Ben Sin

Published: 9:16am, 30 Jun 2018Updated: 5:41pm, 1 Jul 2018

At one point, 2018 was shaping up to be the year of the smartphone notch, but last month Shenzhen brands Vivo and Oppo threw a wrench into the plans with the separate launch of two “true” all-screen – meaning no notch – handsets a week apart. While we’ve yet to get our hands on Oppo’s Find X, we have been testing Vivo’s Nex, and it’s a collection of futuristic concepts tucked into a refined package.

Design and hardware

Ever since Xiaomi got the ball rolling with the Mi Mix in autumn 2016, the smartphone industry has been on a mission to eliminate bezels as much as possible. While the Mi Mix achieved its almost no-bezel look by eliminating the proximity sensor and relocating the selfie camera, Apple decided the approach was too radical and settled for the compromise of the notch, and everyone else agreed that was the way to go.

The Vivo Nex is the first phone to avoid making the Sophie’s choice of either sacrificing sensors or settling for a notch. It has done so by using cutting-edge tech that shoved everything underneath the display.

The Vivo Nex eliminates the notch by moving most of the sensors underneath the display and putting the selfie camera in a module that pops up from the top of the device. Photo: Ben Sin

The proximity sensor, fingerprint reader, and 8-megapixel selfie camera module are all housed inside the handset, with the first two embedded directly behind the OLED display panel and the camera module as a pop-up component at the top of the phone. There is no traditional earpiece; instead the Nex uses bone conducting tech to vibrate sound through the screen to your ears.

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