The somewhat warped pricing of the upper mid-ranger that costs over $1,400 kind of makes this newly announced Vivo Nex 3S 5G flagship device feel way more affordable than it should. But more on that in a bit.
As expected of a 2020 flagship, the Vivo Nex 3S 5G is armed with the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, the 7 nm process SD 865 featuring an octacore processor with clock speed up to 2.84 GHz and Adreno 650 GPU.
It gets 8 or 12 GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 256 GB UFS 3.1 storage. Display is a large 6.89-inch 18.8:9 aspect ratio FHD+ (2,256 x 1,080 pixels) AMOLED “waterfall” display which is also home to an in-display fingerprint sensor.
It has a triple sensor main camera setup comprising of a 64 MP wide angle camera, a 13 MP telephoto camera that offers 2x optical zoom and a 13 MP ultra wide-angle camera. All of which supports PDAF.
Over the front, or rather, the top, is motorized pop-up selfie camera of 16 MP and an LED flash. 2K videoing is possible (2,160p@60fps) as well as slow-mo (720p@960fps) with the front maxing out at 1080p@30fps. Imaging features include PDAF, HDR, panorama, gyro-EIS (no OIS, it seems).
Other notables include a 3.5 mm headphone jack, dual-band WiFi supporting up to ax, Bluetooth 5.1 with BLE, support A2DP and aptX HD, USB Type-C port, NFC, GPS (A-GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, Beidou), dual SIM, a hidden pressure-sensitive volume control, the usual suspect of sensors, and a 4,500 mAh battery with 44 W fast charging.
Right now, the Vivo Nex 3S 5G is available in China with a starting price of 4,998 yuan which, based on the current going rate, works out to be around US$712. I am seriously wondering if the AW edition‘s pricing had a typo.
Images: Vivo [CH].
