Vivo NEX Review

Shown in Shanghai on 12 June 2018, a week before the Find X, the NEX S went on sale at CNY 4,498 for 8GB/128GB, about $700. A cheaper NEX A with a Snapdragon 710 and a rear fingerprint reader sold for CNY 3,898, and the phone exported to India as the plain NEX was the S. There was no US launch and the price here is that conversion. The front is a 6.59-inch 1080x2316 Super AMOLED with a thin chin and nothing else: the 8MP selfie camera lives in a motorised sliver that rises from the top edge in about a second with its own little sound effect, the earpiece is replaced by a piezo driver vibrating the screen, and the fingerprint reader is Vivo's third-generation optical unit under the glass, slow by later standards but functional.

Snapdragon 845 with 8GB of RAM flew, and the 4000mAh battery with 22.5W charging comfortably outlasted a Galaxy S9. The 12MP Sony IMX363 main camera with four-axis OIS and a 5MP depth unit produced clean daylight shots and average night ones. The costs are the ones you would guess: no water resistance, a mechanism to worry about in a 199-gram phone, a screen speaker that sounds thin on calls, and Funtouch OS 4.0 on Android 8.1, an iOS copy with a control centre swiped up from the bottom and a poor update record after Android 9.

Within weeks of launch the camera famously rose on its own when apps like QQ Browser polled the camera, and a hardware privacy indicator was born by accident. OnePlus, Redmi, Realme and Asus had all copied the idea by the end of 2019.