If 2019 is the "first year of 5G", there is no doubt that 2021 is destined to be the year of folding mobile phones. In the past year, Samsung, the originator of folding screens, has raised the usability of folding screen mobile phones to a new level with more aggressive UTG glass, more advanced folding hinge technology and more durable fuselages; Huawei Mate X2 has raised the upper limit of high-end folding screen mobile phones with exquisite workmanship; OPPO Find N has made folding screen mobile phones evolve from an early digital technology toy into a folding screen mobile phone that can be used in daily life and has practical use value. Even the Xiaomi MIX Fold, which has mixed user reviews, also marks the starting point of the MIUI folding screen version for Xiaomi, which has positive positive significance.
It can be said that the main players of domestic mobile phones have opened the exploration of folding screen mobile phones in 2021, and there are many gains, but there is such a domestic mobile phone brand, in 2021, when domestic folding screen mobile phones are frequent, it seems to be a bit out of place.
That's right, here's vivo. During 2021, Vivo's folding screen mobile phone seems to have only appeared in the mouth of self-media. Some people say that the vivo folding screen phone looks like a tablet, some people say that the screen size of this phone is as high as 7 inches, and some people say that it adopts a vertical folding valgus design that has not appeared before. But we still have not been able to see this phone in 2021, when the folding screen is the hottest, and the puzzle of domestic mobile phones in the field of folding screen is also missing a piece of vivo.
However, on March 7, we finally saw the hardware parameters of the vivo folding mobile phone that is more in line with the market law, and we also had a more detailed understanding of the hardware configuration and market positioning of this mobile phone.
Vivo folding screen configuration exposure
According to the news, the vivo folding screen mobile phone X Fold will use Qualcomm's flagship mobile chip Snapdragon 8Gen1, the camera uses a full-focal length four-camera and a 50 million pixel main camera, and the product price will also come to the price of 10,000 yuan. As for the core of the folding screen mobile phone - the screen, the outer screen of the vivo X Fold is a curved screen designed with a single punch hole in the center, and the inner screen is an 8-inch waterdrop reel screen, from the classic subway spy photos, the crease treatment of the inner screen is very good, and the oppo Find N, the holder of the internal screen without trace records, is comparable.
As for the battery, the X Fold will be equipped with a 4600mAh battery and support 80W wired flash charge, if the information is true, from the configuration point of view, X Fold does have a price of ten thousand yuan. But if we look at the X Fold from another angle, it is not difficult to find a problem: although the X70 series performs well in the high-end market, in the ultra-high-end market of 10,000 yuan, vivo seems to have no "machine" to do.
Not long ago, Vivo announced the cancellation of the flagship mobile phone NEX product line, vivo brand flagship mobile phone responsibility will be handed over to the X series. In Xiao Lei's view, this is likely to be the reason why "the NEX series cannot provide enough competitiveness at the original price point and needs to re-establish a new flagship brand". Take NEX 3 as an example: after the failure of the NEX dual-screen version, Vivo seized the market opportunity of large curvature curved screens and launched the NEX 3 series mobile phones in a short period of time. From the perspective of product design, neX 3 is indeed remarkable, but judging from the perspective of the practicality of mobile phones and software ecology, the NEX 3 series is not doing a good job.
After the nex 3 was launched, the large curved surface screen was criticized by many consumers due to the display effect and the characteristics of false touch. For brands with two or more flagship product lines, the loss of one series could be compensated for by tilting to the other, but for vivo at the time, the highly monolithic NEX series apparently did not leave room for retreat. According to statistics, at the beginning of 2018, Vivo invested a lot of resources in marketing promotion, but the highly anticipated first product NEX full-screen mobile phone sold only 2 million units in half a year in the statistics of third-party data agencies - this is already the peak of the entire NEX series.
For vivo, the VIVO NEX series, which is not necessarily applauded but certainly not popular, has become the biggest obstacle to vivo's impact on the flagship mobile phone, so in recent years, vivo has handed over the flagship mobile phone to the X series to take care of, and the cancellation of NEX is only a matter of time.
Vivo needs a new flagship
Although the cancellation of the NEX series can play a "throttling" role for vivo, putting more time and research and development energy on the X series, in 2021, the X series has formed a very clear market positioning, hastily put the new flagship mobile phone into the X series, in case the two fail to pull apart enough product differences, it is likely that there will be a lose-lose effect for vivo. So is there any way to insert a new product line into the X series, but at the same time it will not affect the original X series product layout? Folding screen mobile phones and large-screen mobile phones that are very different from traditional mobile phones are the best choice.
First of all, the folding screen in the form of the mobile phone can be pulled away enough from the original X series mobile phone: hardware, folding screen mobile phone will be more expanded as a tablet computer use, its use scenario is very different from the conventional X series; software, vivo X series is currently highly dependent on OriginOS, and OriginOS itself in the design concept itself has a certain modular attributes, once the future completes the adaptation of large screens and tablets, it will bring new and intuitive interaction to folding screen devices. Considering that the current major folding screen mobile phone brands have not been able to solve the problem of application ecology after the expansion of the large screen, some brands of folding screen can only rotate the screen to see the straight screen content after unfolding, vivo has an inherent advantage in the system of folding screen mobile phones.
But more importantly, vivo needs a folding screen device that is positioned at a high end and high price to make up for its influence in the field of high-end mobile phones. Huawei, Xiaomi and OPPO have all established flagship mobile phones in their brand system through product hard power and just the right product strategy, and successfully "featured" their flagship products, whether from the appearance or from the function, we can distinguish at a glance which brand of product a high-end mobile phone is. However, vivo, which takes imaging as its core competitiveness, does not seem to have been able to open up enough gaps with other brands, especially considering that imaging will be one of the focuses of future mobile phone development, vivo's products obviously need to continue to work hard in user cognition.
In this case, choose to play their own system advantages, comprehensively improve the software experience of the folding screen, and once again exchange for the opportunity to find the next hardware burst, which is undoubtedly the best opportunity for vivo to impact high-end mobile phones. But then again, even if the supply chain of the folding screen market has been relatively mature, under the influence of the epidemic, the production capacity of related components is quite limited.
Considering that Huawei and Samsung have accumulated their own controllable supply chain in the field of folding screens, for vivo who misses the entry time point, this is bound to affect the final product competitiveness. In the absence of key self-developed technologies, Vivo's folding path is clearly unclear. Whether vivo can find its own position between Huawei, Samsung and Apple with X folding screens and X tablets, to be honest, no one can guarantee.
The uncontrollable external supply chain not only means that the production capacity of mobile phones is not guaranteed, but also brings the problem of homogenization of folding mobile phones to vivo. According to The Counterpoint report, folding screen mobile phones want to dominate the high-end mobile phone market, at least until 2025, when the high-end folding screen mobile phones priced at more than 10,000 yuan will occupy 40%-50% of the high-end mobile phone market if there is no accident, and the head competition pattern will also be settled.
Before 2025, each folding screen mobile phone brand also needs to be guided by long-term users to make users willing to buy and use folding screen mobile phones. And the long process of guiding users to endurance, from this point of view, vivo at this time to enter the folding screen mobile phone is obviously too late.
The only thing that can be determined is that vivo's entry into the folding screen and Android tablet market will certainly enrich the choice of Android hardware at this stage, and under the reasonable market competition, more and more brands will join the ranks of folding screens and Android tablets. Ecological construction requires hardware foundation, and with the joint efforts of various brands, Android's large-screen application ecology will also usher in new hopes.