Another phone maker has joined the small but prestige folding phone market. And I am glad that there is a growing number of folding phones. Hopefully, with more competition, the folding lines will be a thing of the past. Speaking of less or no crease lines on a folding phone, Vivo’s first folding phone, the Vivo X Fold, promised just that.
Clearly, folding lines are not going away anytime soon. The question is how visible are they. Like the Oppo Find N which has barely visible fold lines, Vivo X Fold has made crease lines almost non-existent – thanks to a new kind of hinge design.
This so-called aerospace-grade “floating wing” hinge is said to create a crease depth of less than 0.12 mm. If that’s true, it really is barely visible. However, you should be able to feel it when you run your fingers across it. But hey, it is a marked improvement and we look forward to the day when the folding screen will have zero creases.
Like the Vivo Pad, The X Fold is another of Vivo’s first and one of the two devices from the new X series. As such, Vivo is giving it the best it can offer. This includes the world’s first 3D ultrasonic dual-screen fingerprint sensor. That’s right. It is not one but two 3D ultrasonic fingerprint scanners. Vivo really spares no expense, and this isn’t it. More on that in a bit.
Aesthetically, the Vivo X Fold looked like the newly announced Vivo X Note when closed. It has the same double bump design where a round camera bump sits atop a huge slab of the camera bump.
Speaking of cameras, the main snapper is a quad-camera set that appears to be the same as the X Note. In other words, there is the 50 MP “oversized” main camera with OIS, a 48 MP super wide-angle (114-degree) camera, a 12 MP pro-grade portrait camera, and an 8 MP periscope-style zoom camera that offers 5x optical zoom, 60x superzoom, with OIS.
The quad-camera also benefits from Zeiss optics. On the inside, it appears to share the same 16 MP selfie camera.
The Vivo X Fold is also the first on the market with dual 120 Hz E5 displays, so you’d get the best visuals in both closed and open modes.
It has an LTPO 8.03-inch AMOLED main display that offers 2,160 x 1,916 pixels with a 4:3.55 aspect ratio. Meanwhile, the external display is a 6.53-inch AMOLED display in a 21:9 aspect ratio and packs 2,520 x 1,080 pixels.
The Vivo X Fold is outfitted with a 4,600 mAh that supports 66 W fast charging and 50W wireless charging.
Under the hood is, of course, the fastest chip there is today, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip, bolstered by the fastest RAM and storage, i.e. LPDDR5 4-channel memory and UFS 3.1. The device further boasts a huge 27217 mm2 worth of heat dissipation area.
Other notables include 5G and LTE radios, dual SIM support (nano-SIM), face unlocks, Jovi voice assistant, Android 12 with OriginOS UI, Wi-Fi6, Bluetooth 5.2, NFC, and support for no less than 6 GPS systems.
Pre-sale of the Vivo X Fold Folding Phone is now happening in China for a starting price of 8,999 yuan (roughly US$1,413).
The phone will officially hit the stores on April 22.
Images: Vivo [CH].
