Now, why didn’t we think of that?

One can just imagine the creative team at Vivo getting a briefing: Go think out of the box like never before and find a way to make a full screen and I don’t care how you do it, but don’t compromise on anything important. If it was really anything like that, the result is quite impressive.

Vivo, which needs altogether no introduction to the Indian audience, has come up with another ‘Nex’ smartphone with a whole bunch of innovative solutions. The previous Nex brought in the now more commonly found in-display sensor, and a bone-conduction method that made the whole phone a speaker instead of having an earpiece take up space on the screen — all in the interest of going full screen without any edges. Now the company’s gone further and removed the pop-up camera, which everyone was worried would snap right off if the phone were to fall at the time it was out or just stop working because the mechanical parts in it would eventually give up. Vivo has now come up with a dual screen phone, which is surely going to make a lot of companies wonder why they didn’t think of it earlier.

The Vivo Nex now has screens on both back and front. If you’re thinking this makes the phone more vulnerable, remember that practically all phones now use glass on both sides anyway.

You’re less likely to use a case, and that may indeed make it more vulnerable to damage, but at the same time, there is the possibility that you’ll be left with a working screen if one side were to be damaged.

One of the two screens is the one that barely has any edges and is 6.39 inches of pure space for photos, videos and whatever else you like to do. It’s an AMOLED display, so it looks nice and vivid, something you can see right away as you swipe to see its changeable wallpapers. On the screen, there’s no punch hole or no notch for a camera. It’s all clean screen. It’s not completely edgeless, but does have extremely thin bezels.

The secondary screen on the other side is 5.49 inches, smaller because this is where the cameras are located. To get to this second screen, you swipe three fingers on the main screen, and to get back, do the same again. There are actually two power buttons on this phone, so you can unlock it from either side. You can’t have both displays on at the same time. Perhaps one day, when battery life is dramatically better, one can consider that possibility. The screen switch isn’t possible under all conditions but in most apps.

The main use is to let you take a selfie. In the camera app, when you switch to take your own photo, pointer text will tell you to turn the phone over and that’s when you press the trigger. If you’re using it on someone else, they can see themselves and pose or pout accordingly. There are other interesting uses of the dual screens. When enabled from the phone’s settings, you can turn the phone over to open a notification or message.

There’s an in-display fingerprint sensor, which works on one screen while the other uses face recognition or a password.

With all that Vivo has put into this phone, leaving one screen free of other components, it’s interesting that they’ve managed to retain the 3.5 mm headphone jack. The device is also dual-SIM.

There’s a 3,500 mAh battery, 128 GB storage, Android 9 Pie and a hefty 10 GB of RAM, which adds to the smooth navigation and screen switching that needs to be done on this phone.

There’s also the Snapdragon 845 processor. For India, the specs are not very relevant as this unique smartphone hasn’t been launched here yet. All the same, it does carry with it lots of innovations that one will likely see on upcoming smartphones.

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