Vivo Apex pop-up camera means true bezel-free display that makes iPhone X look ugly

published 27 February 2018

The Vivo Apex could be the most exciting thing at the Mobile World Congress show this year, including the Samsung Galaxy S9 and Sony Xperia XZ2. The stunning Vivo Apex features the world’s first truly edge-to-edge bezel-free display – thanks to a pop up camera.

The Vivo Apex display is all screen, meaning a meagre 1.8mm bezel at the top and 4.3mm at the bottom. That means there is no space for a front-facing camera, speaker or fingerprint sensor. But rather than plonking in an ugly notch like on Apple’s iPhone X, Vivo has managed to keep everything hidden.

Under the Vivo Apex display is a fingerprint sensor that works through the glass, meaning you can pace a finger on the screen and it will read your unique signature to unlock the device. One of the best parts is here is that this works for about half of the display so you don’t even need to be accurate in finger placement.

Also hidden in the screen is speaker technology that uses the screen’s glass to resonate as a speaker when your ear is to the phone.

Finally, the front-facing camera – this has been put in a pop-up unit that appears when the phone is put into selfie mode. Genius. This is an 8-megapixel snapper which pops up in just 0.8 seconds.

The catch to all this? The Vivo Apex is currently a concept phone shown off at MWC 2018, so we’ll have to hope it gets mass produced for all to own in the near future.

Luke is a former freelance writer for T3 with over two decades of experience covering tech, science and health. Among many others Luke wrote about health tech, software and apps, VPNs, TV, audio, smart home, antivirus, broadband, smartphones, cars and plenty more. In his free time, Luke used to climb mountains, swim outside and contort his body into silly positions while breathing as calmly as possible.