Meet the Vivo APEX 2019 - Buttonless and Portless Future?

We go hands-on the Vivo APEX 2019 5G concept phone that features an all screen display with a curved glass back without ports and physical buttons!

One of the highest screen to body ratio phone in the world

At first glance, the APEX 2019 is simply eye catching. The large 6.39-inch AMOLED display takes over the whole of the front while the curved glass takes over the whole of the back. 

Inside is the Snapdragon 855 with 12GB of RAM and up to 512GB of internal storage.

Let's take a closer look!

Meet Vivo APEX 2019

The immersive AMOLED display

In front is the 6.39-inch Super AMOLED display with one of the thinnest top and side bezels in the market today. The bottom bezel is slightly thicker than rest but we don't see it as an issue as most of your focus will be on the display.

There is no front facing camera but now you can use every part of the display as a fingerprint scanner which we could see in future devices.

APEX 2019 in Black

At the back is one large glass back cover that is beautiful but both fingerprint and scratch prone. At the upper half is the dual rear facing cameras. Below it is the Apex branding while near the edge of the bottom is the CPU contacts for data and power transfer. 

Vivo calls the all glass back the Super Unibody design.

Top side

Bottom side

Left side

Right side

All four sides are smooth with almost nothing on all of them. The only thing we noticed was the oblong shaped outline where the pressure sensitive button is for the power button. Above it are two more pressure sensitive buttons for the volume up and volume down buttons.

The new pressure sensitive power and volume buttons have haptic feedback when you press on them and I feel that it will take some time to get used to this feature. I feel that I will miss the tactile feel of a real button.

The rest of the features

CPU contacts for data and power transfer

It is running on the Snapdragon 855 octa-core processor and the Adreno 640 GPU with 12GB of RAM and up to 512GB of internal storage.

Vivo has rid the phone of ports and outside access like the SIM card tray and the USB type-C port and headphone jack. The display acts as the speaker and earpiece for calls by vibration. 

Because there is no SIM card tray, it uses E-SIM and the storage cannot be expanded by microSD.

Rear Dual cameras with LED flash

Lastly the dual rear cameras are made up of a 12MP and 13MP shooter but with no front facing camera.

Quick thoughts

Vivo's APEX 2019 Concept showcases bleeding edge technology that is now possible to manufacture but are not yet to be available for the mass market. They've simplified a lot of what we expect from phones by removing ports and external access by replacing them with innovative new ways. 

I do wish they had implemented an Airdrop or Huawei Share like file transfer protocol and had implemented wireless and reverse wireless charging on this phone as it would make sense to completely reduce the reliance on ports.

Bleeding edge innovation doesn't come cheap though and we have yet to see whether or not most of these feature will arrive in commercial units. We also don't know how the public will react to these yet but it does excite us to see of what could be.

What do you guys think?