vivo APEX 2019's full display fingerprint reader impresses on video

The vivo APEX 2019 is a hole-less concept phone and as such its purpose in life is to be cool. And it certainly fit the part, check out this video demo below.

There are no buttons on this APEX phone, so it uses the Always-On Display to mark where the touch-sensitive side “buttons” are. Only the Power key has a little nub so you can feel it without looking, but it’s not an actual button (just like on the HTC U12+).

Most impressive, however, is the in-display fingerprint reader – it covers essentially the whole display. The setup starts at 1:30 and ends just seconds later, as it only needs a couple of taps to learn a fingerprint. And then it works quickly and at any orientation.

By the way, the brighter rectangle you’re seeing is just a widget. You can see that the phone can read the finger even below that and unlock.

Anyway, the charging/data cable snaps on magnetically onto the pogo pins on the back, which seems pretty quick once you get used to it. But you do need to carry a proprietary adapter with you.

The video goes on to demo the loudspeaker – remember that no holes means no speaker grill. This starts at 3:15, have a listen. Interestingly, the sound seems to carry in all directions, but is definitely louder from the back.

vivo APEX 2019

The vivo APEX 2019 is configured with a Snapdragon 855 chipset, 12GB of RAM and 512GB storage. It has almost everything, the one thing that's missing is the selfie camera.

Source 1 (in Chinese) | Source 2