The Good
Using the Vivo Nex’s full, no-notch screen is an unparalleled experience and performance is as smooth as butter. The pop-up camera works pretty well, too.
The Bad
Its copycat iPhone X gestures are unwieldy and hard to use. It feels heavy.
The Bottom Line
The Vivo Nex’s clever engineering and fantastic notch-free screen serve as a model for other phones.
Vivo’s Nex demonstrates everything a phone of the future can be. It starts with a bezel-less 6.59-inch Super AMOLED display featuring a full HD+ resolution of 2,136×1,080 pixels. There’s no front speaker grill, which gives it a clean, nothing-but-screen look. The fingerprint reader is integrated into the screen, and a powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor powers the phone.
The Nex is amazing to look at, and it’s the perfect conversation starter. I’ve had plenty of people marvel at the pop-up camera, though the first question is usually almost always, “Will it break?” The answer is no, it won’t, but more on that later.
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The Vivo Nex’s cutting-edge design is also clever
Companies that make “all-screen” phones have a problem: where do you put the front-facing camera, speaker grill and other sensors you need to make a phone work?
Vivo’s solution is to strip them out entirely, which makes for a phone face that’s over 91 percent screen.
The highlight of the phone, the 8-megapixel selfie camera lives inside the phone body and pops up when you take a selfie. The mechanism is sturdy and likely unlikely to break. I tested it carefully at first before applying more force, and I’m confident that it’s anything but flimsy. The eject mechanism is also pretty strong too, enough to keep pushing away my finger, which was purposely blocking it, with some strength. When you switch from the rear dual cameras to the front pop-up selfie, the switching speed is only slower by about half a second at most compared to the iPhone X.
Another cool piece of engineering is the underscreen fingerprint sensor. Another Vivo phone, the Vivo X21 , has this, too, and honestly, I wasn’t too impressed. It was slower than an actual physical scanner, and was sometimes frustrating to use. The Nex features the third-generation Synaptics scanner, however, which registers my prints almost immediately, a definite improvement.
While the X21 had face unlocking to help with the fingerprint unlock, the option isn’t available on the Nex, since the selfie camera is hidden away. But the in-screen fingerprint reader is fast enough.
To really cement the all-screen experience, Vivo also took away the Nex’s front-firing speakers. Instead, it uses the screen as a speaker when you’re taking calls through the use of a linear vibrator, which basically transmits the sound to the frame of the phone that’s relayed through the screen. This tech is similar to Xiaomi ‘s Mi Mix 2 , but plays out better on the Vivo Nex. Unlike the Mi Mix 2, the Nex doesn’t broadcast your audio to everyone within hearing range. Regular music and video playback use a bottom-firing speaker instead.
Vivo Nex camera, battery life and speed
The Nex’s AI-powered dual-rear cameras are pretty good. It uses a 12- and 5-megapixel setup that lets you take portrait mode shots, though there’s no optical zoom. Low-light performance is decent, but can be too sharpened at times. Performance is very similar to the Vivo X21, but that’s no surprise, because both phones share the same setup.
Packing a 4,000-mAh battery, the Vivo Nex easily lasted a day of use. It lasted 21 hours, 50 minutes in our video loop tests. Performance from its Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor easily matched up to other flagship phones with a similar processor, such as the Samsung Galaxy S9 , the Sony Xperia XZ2 and the LG G7 ThinQ . In real-world use, the phone is buttery smooth, apps load fast and games such as Asphalt 7 deliver fluid performance even at the highest graphical settings.
Check out the benchmark scores below to see how the Nex performed.
- 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited
- Vivo Nex63,324Samsung Galaxy S958,157LG G7 ThinQ56,714Huawei P20 Pro30,781
- Note: Longer bars indicate better performance
- GeekBench v4.0 single-core
- Vivo Nex2,449Samsung Galaxy S92,180LG G7 ThinQ2,436Huawei P20 Pro1,918
- Note: Longer bars indicate better performance
- GeekBench v4.0 multicore
- Vivo Nex9,145Samsung Galaxy S98,302LG G7 ThinQ8,742Huawei P20 Pro6,751
- Note: Longer bars indicate better performance
Score Breakdown
Design 9✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨
Features 8✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨
Performance 8✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨
Camera 8✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨
Battery 10✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨