Vivo is another Chinese company that has slowly been making a name for itself. After showing off a concept phone called APEX which had a ton of unique features, Vivo brought this phone into fruition in the form of the Vivo NEX S. The Vivo NEX S is Vivo’s latest flagship and it checks all the boxes of being one. Demanding a price upward of Rs. 85,000, let’s see if it’s worth that price.

Design - The most bezel-less phone to date

One of the features of the APEX concept phone that got translated to the NEX S is the presence of a fully bezel-less display. That’s right, no notch, no upper or lower bezel for sensors/cameras. When you look at the front, it’s just screen. The back of the phone has an iPhone X-esque dual camera setup and a logo towards the middle and bottom. The front and back of the phone is glass while the frames are of metal. The phone itself is pretty tall which all adds up to the weight of 200 grams. Despite its tall stature, the Vivo NEX S is pretty slim at 8mm.

Again, just like the APEX concept, the front facing camera is fixated it in an automatically ejecting module that is on the top of the phone. When the front facing camera is accessed through the camera app, the module ejects from the top of the phone and slides back in when you’re not using it.  The fingerprint sensor is under the display, so all you do is put your finger on the icon when unlocking the phone. Similarly, the earpiece has been replaced by a piezoelectric speaker that can also be found under the display.

Display – all you’ll see on this phone

The display of the Vivo NEX S is undoubtedly its most attractive feature since it’s the only thing you’ll see every time you pick up the phone. It’s a massive 6.59-inch FHD+ display meaning the pixel density is a respectable 388ppi. The display is a Super AMOLED one, the same one Samsung uses in its own devices. All that just means it’s one beautiful screen to look at.

The specs of the Vivo NEX S cameras are what you’ll find on every other flagship in 2018, but in reality the image quality isn’t near as good. The main dual camera setup comprises of a 12MP main sensor and a secondary 5MP one. The first sensor has an aperture of f/1.8 and has PDAF and 4-axis OIS. This should help a lot in blurry videos/photos. The secondary 5MP camera has an aperture of f/2.4 and is mostly used in detecting backgrounds for portrait shots.

The front facing camera 8MP is relatively decent and takes good pics under proper lighting.

Hardware – Nothing less of any flagship

The hardware on the Vivo NEX S is exactly what you’d expect on any other flagship. Snapdragon 845, 8GB of RAM and base model having 128GB of memory. The battery is a 4000mAh cell which should last you more than a day. The android version shipped on the phone is Android 8.1 Oreo.

Vivo NEX S pros:

• It has a large/beautiful/truly bezel-less screen
• Lots of RAM and storage
• Big battery

Vivo NEX S cons:

• The camera is not up to flagship standard
• The moving front facing camera can cause problems other phones may not have