The New Vivo Nex Phone Offers a Secondary Display Instead of a Notch

Vivo doesn’t get a lot of attention outside of China, but it turned heads in early 2018 when it showed off the all-screen Apex prototype. That phone went on to become the Nex, and there’s already a follow-up. Like the original Nex, the new phone has almost no bezel around the screen, but there are big bezels on the back. The Nex Dual Display Edition has a smaller display on the back, which is another way to avoid having a display notch.

The Apex/Nex was notable not only because it had almost no bezel, but also because of the pop-up selfie camera. Most phones in 2018 have adopted the notch design, which calls for a cutout at the top of the screen to house the camera and other sensors. The aesthetics of this design quirk are divisive, to say the least, but the motorized camera came with its own set of problems. There’s no need for that on the Nex Dual Display Edition, though.

With the new Nex, you don’t even need a front-facing camera. The main phone display 6.4-inches and 2340 x 1080 with almost no bezel, and there’s a fingerprint sensor inside. Flip the phone over, and there’s a 5.5-inch 1080p display. Both are OLED panels, but the rear screen has very sizeable top and bottom bezels. There are three camera sensors on the back including a 12MP main shooter, a 2MP depth sensor, and a time-of-flight 3D camera. If you want to take a selfie, you just flip the phone over and use the rear display. That ring around the cameras also glows to take more evenly lit selfies, and it can pulse for notifications.

Vivo offered a few other potential use cases for that back screen, none of which seem especially compelling. For example, you could use the rear touchscreen to add buttons or a touchpad to a game. That would probably require developers to specifically code support for this phone, which is unlikely. Vivo also suggests you could use it to show the subject of a photo what it looks like as you’re taking it.

Aside from the unusual display setup, the Nex Dual Display Edition is a high-end Android phone with a Snapdragon 845 chip, 10GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. The battery is a little smaller than the last Nex (3500 vs. 4000mAh), probably because of the secondary display. While it runs Android, it’s a Chinese phone with no Google services. Still, a lot of people love these experimental cutting edge phones, even if they’re impractical. The Nex Dual Display Edition goes on sale December 29th for 4,998 yuan (about $725).

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