Vivo's Apex concept phone gives you a peek into the future

After stealing the show at CES 2018 with the World's first smartphone that has an in-display fingerprint scanner, Vivo is making waves again with another concept phone "Apex". Apex, as the company describes it, has many ahead-of-its-time technologies like the 'Half-Screen In-Display Fingerprint Scanning', 'Screen SoundCasting Technology' that can transform the screen into a loudspeaker, and OLED giving way to a new design that moves a step further in an almost bezel-less direction.

The 'Half-Screen In-Display Fingerprint Scanning', as the name suggests, makes use of almost half of the phone screen as a fingerprint scanner instead of the circular icon illuminating on the screen as in-display fingerprint scanner on the Vivo X20PlusUD. The wider scanner makes it easier to unlock the phone and could pave way for new security standards such as dual-fingerprint scanning for additional security.

Apex uses Vivo's Screen SoundCasting Technology that transforms the entire display into a speaker - it sends vibrations through the display that in-turn produces a sound. Vivo claims that this technology conserves power, reduces sound leakage, and optimises low to high pitch sound for a better and more balanced audio experience.

Bragging rights for the world's highest screen-to-body ratio are backed by a 6-inch edge-to-edge display where the top and side bezels are just 1.8mm, while the bottom bezel is just 4.3mm. With such thin bezels mounting a selfie camera module ought to be a problem which Vivo unravelled by adding a pop-up camera module that springs out from the top in 0.8 seconds.

Bezel-less design is no more stuff of lore and with Google buying Redux, a UK-based company that turns a smartphone screen into a speaker, concept phones like Apex may just turn up in your hands sooner than one can expect.