Today, mobile phone manufacturers who still stand in the center of the stage do not have only one product series, and there are not many product lines that can become the symbol of the brand, they often undergo years of continuous iteration, and there is no shortage of amazing people.
This is the case with the vivo X series. From the X1, which focuses on thin and light bodies, to the X21, which takes the lead in using screen fingerprints, to the X50 that introduces micro-gimbal technology, the X series has brought too many surprises, and many people have become vivo's "blue friends".
On the occasion of its tenth anniversary, the X Series ushered in the next stage of development, adding Note and Fold to the original digital series to better meet the needs of business users. The protagonist of this article is Vivo's first folding screen mobile phone - Vivo X Fold.
The "no compromise" of folding screen mobile phones
The first folding screen has been on the market for almost four years since mass production. Over the past few years, while first-movers have been optimizing and improving the product experience, it's too hard to mature quickly enough for these emerging devices. Therefore, compared with the conventional flagship mobile phone after more than ten years of development, there is a certain gap in the previous folding screen mobile phone in many places.
One of the things that makes vivo X Fold appealing is that it is as uncompromising as possible. It has a 6.53-inch Samsung AMOLED outer screen, E5 illuminated material, a resolution of 2520 × 1080 pixels resolution, and good color and display detail. In addition, due to the support for 120Hz screen refresh rate, the screen and chirality are very good, and when the mobile phone is closed, it is completely fine to use as the main screen.
Although the inner and outer screens seem to be independent, in fact, they are not really unrelated. First of all, the right side of the vivo X Fold outer screen has been curved, which can make more space for the lower hinge, and because it can increase the contact area between the finger belly and the edge of the screen, the experience will be better when opening and closing the phone.
In addition, instead of choosing the usual 20:9 screen ratio, it is 21:9. It is precisely for this reason that the inner screen has come to a very comfortable ratio of 4 : 3.55, especially in the reading scene, and the efficiency improvement brought by this screen ratio is very obvious.
Of course, the inner screen is the core of the folding screen mobile phone. As we all know, although they are all horizontal folding schemes, the product paths taken by various manufacturers are not the same, and the route chosen by vivo X Fold is in line with our initial expectations for folding screen mobile phones: large screens.
Its inner screen measures 8.03 inches, which is a bit larger than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 inner screen and comparable to some tablets. After switching from the external screen to the inner screen, the visual contrast is very obvious, and the mobile phone and tablet are successfully made on one device.
What was really surprising was the quality of the inner screen. Because the screen structure and material of the folding screen mobile phone are relatively special, there is no way to directly take the conventional mobile phone solution to use, so for a long time in the past, the screen quality of such products is not satisfactory.
After the bright screen, you will find that the inner screen of the vivo X Fold does not lose the direct screen flagship. It uses Samsung AMOLED E5 screen, 2160 x 1916 pixel resolution, while adding UTG glass, the actual display effect is more transparent, the content is also enough.
Another thing I like about the vivo X Fold is that it does a great job of consistency in the internal and external screen experience. Since vivo has made special adjustments for the color of the inner and outer screens, the color will not change significantly when the screen is switched.
In addition, vivo X Fold is currently the only mass production folding screen mobile phone with a refresh rate of 120Hz on both the internal and external screens, whether it is operated on the outer screen or the inner screen, it can get a very smooth experience, without any sense of separation, and it is very cool to use.
In order to reduce the screen power consumption to a certain extent, vivo uses LTPO adaptive refresh rate technology for the mobile phone's internal screen. This time to use down, the intelligent switching refresh rate mode in its battery life is indeed slightly better, but if the pursuit of the ultimate fluency of use, you can manually adjust to the 120Hz option, of course, the power consumption will also come up, we choose according to the actual situation.
Using a 3D ultrasound dual-screen fingerprint was something I didn't expect. In fact, although the screen fingerprint is not new to the conventional straight phone, due to the special structure of the inner screen of the folding screen mobile phone, such products that have been listed before have not followed the screen fingerprint, all of which are side physical fingerprint schemes, whether it is convenient to use or the sense of technology, it seems that the tone of the folding screen mobile phone is not quite consistent.
The great thing about vivo is that they not only brought ultrasonic fingerprints to the X Fold, but also made the use experience to a very good level. As you can see, the outer screen and inner screen fingerprint recognition area are in roughly corresponding positions, in other words, when the phone is closed/expanded, you can easily use your thumb to complete the unlock or payment operation.
Special hinge design, as well as diversified use scenarios
From the perspective of operation logic, the biggest difference between folding screen mobile phones and conventional straight mobile phones is that the former is static and the latter is dynamic. The ability to change the size of the screen by folding is the basis for folding screen mobile phones to become a new product direction, but it is not an easy task to make the mobile phone still perform well in the dynamic use process.
Perhaps more ordinary consumers will focus on the screen, but the hinge is equally important to the folding screen mobile phone, which is not only the physical support for the mobile phone to achieve folding, but also directly affects the inner screen crease.
Vivo designed the "Aerospace-class floating wing hinge" for the X Fold. Officials said they used six-fold aviation materials including liquid metal zirconium alloy, F53 aviation high-strength steel, hand-torn steel sheets and other six-fold aviation materials in the hinge's 174 parts.
The advantage of using many special materials is to control the weight as much as possible while allowing the vivo X Fold hinge to achieve a very high strength and a bending life of more than 300,000 times. Converted down, even if the phone is folded 80 times a day, it can support about 10 years of normal use, according to the current replacement cycle, before replacing the new machine, there is basically no need to worry about hinge problems.
The general direction of the hinge design of the vivo X Fold is actually not mysterious, and it is also a droplet type that currently performs well overall. There are two special places:
First of all, vivo specially made a floating middle board for it, when opening the mobile phone, the middle plate rises together with the central position to improve the flatness of the inner screen after expansion; when closed, the middle plate falls to leave more space for the folding area, which has certain benefits for protecting the screen;
In addition, thanks to the relatively higher hardness of UTG glass, the hinge bend radius of the vivo X Fold is much smaller than other mobile phones with the same water drop solution, so its closing tightness is correspondingly better, and the two creases on the left and right sides of the inner screen will be narrower and shallower after unfolding.
When I started writing this article, I used the vivo X Fold as the main machine for almost a week. Personally, among the many folding screen mobile phones, its crease control is a very good one, and the presence of creases will not be noticed at all when looking at the front.
It is necessary to explain that this does not mean that it has been able to completely eliminate the inner screen crease (all folding screen mobile phones can not do this in a short period of time), but the shallower crease means that the screen looks much better, without worrying about affecting the content display.
Vivo X Fold hinge design scheme is mature, not only reflected in reliability and crease control, etc., as a flagship folding screen mobile phone released in 2022, it also supports screen multi-angle hover (about 60-120 °), and adapted on the application side. Whether it has the ability to hover from multiple angles directly affects the richness of large-screen use scenarios from the hardware level.
Take watching a video, for example. Conventional straight mobile phones or mobile phones that do not have multi-angle hover of the screen need to rely on external objects such as protective shells to stand on the desktop, which will be more troublesome and not easy to adjust to the most comfortable viewing angle.
This is much simpler on the vivo X Fold, the phone can not only stand at any angle, the screen can also automatically "split in two". As you can see, the half of the screen is used as a display area, and the lower half can act as a trackpad, adjusting the progress bar or controlling the volume by sliding, which is very convenient to use.
There are many convenient use scenarios brought by multi-angle hovering of the screen, such as when shooting, you can see the film effect in real time, or adjust the screen to the desired angle to obtain a special picture that used to be completed through a tripod or auxiliary equipment.
In the process of use, we also found another interesting scene, because its screen size is large enough, when standing in PC mode, it can also let the lower and lower parts of the screen bear the display and touch tasks like watching videos, and can be easily read without holding.
In fact, the folding screen mobile phone with the ability to hover from multiple angles of the screen can bring a lot of imagined or unexpected convenience of use, especially in the later stage, with the increasing software adaptation, the playability will undoubtedly become stronger and stronger, or it is still worth looking forward to.
More business-friendly folding screen phones
Big screen, more than big. Since the folding screen mobile phone entered the mass production stage, manufacturers have been exploring how to really use the big screen, but the direction chosen by each company will be more or less different. As far as vivo X Fold is concerned, while doing a good job of "should have" functions, it puts a lot of attention on meeting the needs of business people.
First, let's talk about the "should have" function. vivo X Fold supports application multi-window display (you can manually select related applications in the setting interface), similar to the parallel horizon function of Huawei Mate X2, after opening, the screen will be divided into two to display two levels of menus, browsing Jingdong, Taobao and other shopping software is very easy to use, brushing Weibo can also be very convenient to leave a message.
The small window display and split screen display function do not exist in isolation. As the GIF demonstrates, when you want the app window to appear, you can call the shortcut menu from the edge of the screen and open the corresponding app, and when you hold down the bar above the app and drag it to the edge of the screen, the two apps can achieve split-screen display.
Vivo also designed a gesture split screen operation for this phone, which can be swiped up from the bottom three fingers of the screen. However, in practice, this logic is not so convenient, especially in the case of wet fingers, it is somewhat uncomfortable to operate. Considering the current three-finger decline corresponding to the screenshot operation, if the split screen is changed to a three-finger right slide, it may be better than the current version of the scheme.
In order to meet the business use scenarios, vivo X Fold is probably the most thoughtful one in the current folding screen mobile phone, originOS Ocean system original atomic reading, atomic notes, email, vivo also pre-installed for it including translation machine, WPS Office, amber scanning and other professional office software.
One of my personal non-favorite pieces of software is Amber Scan. Including document scanning, text extraction, photo to PPT, document scanning and other functions, it includes almost all the common graphic processing scenarios in daily work, you can easily convert the documents in front of you into PDF scan files, or scan the ID card and other document information to A4 paper for printing.
Vivo has actually put a lot of effort into the direction of business office. With the help of "Quantum Suite", vivo X Fold can achieve cross-device collaboration with Windows and Mac, after successful connection and cloud synchronization, mobile phone pictures and other content can be directly synchronized to the computer, and allow direct editing of mobile phone content through the computer.
At the same time, the content between the mobile phone and the computer can be dragged and dropped in both directions. Take editing a Word document as an example, after entering text on the PC side, you can directly drag the relevant pictures in the mobile phone album to the Word document to complete the picture, which is very attractive to graphic workers like me, and solves the problem of inconvenient transmission between different devices.
It is worth mentioning that vivo also cooperates with Tiger Securities, Flush, Futu Niu Tiger Securities, Flush, Futu Niu Niu, Oriental Wealth, Tencent Self-Selected Stocks, Big Wisdom and other platforms, in addition to using X Fold's superior split-screen display effect of conventional bar phones, users can also complete the line drawing on the screen, which can provide a great comprehensive use experience for stock speculators.
With a periscope lens, the top flagship should have the level of imagery
Back to the image part of the vivo X series that it is good at. In terms of selfies, the vivo X Fold's inner and outer screens are individually matched with a front camera, so there is no difference between selfies or video calls and regular mobile phones, and no other additional operations are required. In terms of specifications, both front cameras are 16 million pixels, providing a variety of selfie styles such as freshness, texture, pop comics and so on.
The focus is on the rear camera. Vivo X Fold features a "ZEISS full-focal length quad camera" design, with a main camera of 50 megapixels, a Samsung GN5 sensor that supports OIS optical image stabilization with f/1.75 aperture, an ultra-wide angle of 48 million pixels and a field of view of 114°, a periscope telephoto lens with 8 megapixels supporting 5x optical zoom, 60x digital zoom, and optical image stabilization; and a 12MP professional portrait lens with f/1.98 aperture. What's more, its entire range of lenses features a ZEISS T* coating with excellent flare resistance.
The following is a real-life sample without any post-processing:
Standard mode
5x zoom
60x zoom
Standard mode
Ultra wide angle
Macro mode
Portrait mode
Motion capture
Night mode
Judging from the samples we shot above, the overall imaging style of vivo X Fold still belongs to the typical "X" series style, and by default, the film pursues a brighter color performance, which is more pleasing. Of course, if you want to "what you see is what you get", you can manually choose to turn on ZEISS natural colors in the camera control interface, and the finished color will be slightly recycled.
Of course, what I prefer about this phone is that Vivo has not canceled the high-power telephoto lens like many conventional flagships recently listed, whether it is daily or out to play shooting, which can provide you with enough shooting space. Portrait shooting does not need to be mentioned, which belongs to the advantages of vivo mobile phones, and the night scene is very clean.
In terms of playability, vivo X Fold also has a lot to say. For example, you can let the outer screen display the preview screen in real time as needed, which is convenient for the photographer to adjust the shape immediately (the gospel of girls), and because its screen has multi-angle hovering ability, the phone can take ultra-low angle pictures without the help of the waist flat viewfinder.
Of course, the ZEISS lens package, including ZEISS Biotar style bokeh, ZEISS Distagon style bokeh, ZEISS Sonnar style bokeh, ZEISS Planar style bokeh, etc., is also not absent. In addition, vivo X Fold also launched the "Texture Portrait Group Photo" function, which supports face ultra-clear and beauty algorithm superposition, thereby improving the effect of group portraits.
The new Snapdragon 8, safer, is top-notch both "inside and out"
Originally, the hardware configuration part may be the most "boring" place for folding screen mobile phones, but vivo X Fold is an exception. In terms of specifications, it is equipped with a new generation of Snapdragon 8 Gen1 SPU custom flagship chip, matching the overclocked version of UFS3.1 flash memory and the enhanced version of LPDDR5 memory. After upgrading to 2.0, its memory fusion technology can extend 12GB of storage to the equivalent of 16GB.
You should also notice that its official description is a new generation of Snapdragon 8 Gen1 SPU custom chip, rather than a new generation of Snapdragon 8 chip, the extra "SPU customization" is the vivo X Fold special place.
In fact, the full spelling of SPU for Secure Processing Unit, is this generation of Snapdragon 8 chip built-in security processing unit, vivo is joint with Qualcomm to develop applications, based on SPU custom development of the password safe function, which covers online shopping, office, entertainment and other types of applications, where the automatic fill function of the password, can be protected by SPU-level password.
In other respects, the SoC of the vivo X Fold is basically not much different from the regular Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. According to the convention, we used the two software of An TuTu and Master Lu to test its running score, and the actual test of An TuTu score was 977933 points, and Master Lu 1070440 points.
Maybe when talking about the screen, many people are already thinking about the battery life problem. The battery capacity of the vivo X Fold is 4600mAh, which is a decent performance in the folding screen, but vivo has made up for the fast charging scheme, which supports 66W dual battery flash charging, the 50W wireless flash charging and 10W wireless reverse charging in the folding screen mobile phone.
Measured, the original wired charger can be charged from 0 to 20% in 5 minutes, 37% in 10 minutes, 49% in 15 minutes, 57% in 20 minutes, 75% in 30 minutes, and 42 minutes in 100%. In the case of wireless flash charge, it takes about 53 minutes to charge to 100%, and the charging speed is still quite fast.
The charger should give praise. This time, Vivo has a PD dual Type-C socket gallium nitride charger for the original X Fold, as well as a charging cable with a length of 1.5 meters, which can be used directly to charge notebooks, tablets and other devices. Moreover, its charger is a dual C port, which can charge multiple devices at the same time, and it will be very convenient to carry on business trips (if it is sold separately in the later stage, it is estimated to be hot).
As a flagship product focusing on business, there are not many official color matching versions of vivo X Fold, and there are currently only two versions of Qingshan Blue and Sycamore Gray, following the design concept of "Heavenly Round Place". The source of color naming is also more exquisite, "Qingshan Blue" is taken from the Song Dynasty poet Zhao Fan's "Early Departure Shows the Same Boat", and "Wutong Gray" comes from Wang Wei's "Sending Friends back to the Mountain Song", two colors and two styles.
Due to a large 8.03-size inner screen, the vivo X Fold is also very large after the unfolding of the fuselage size, the length reaches 162.01 mm, 144.87 mm wide, the thickness is well controlled, the thinnest place is only 6.28 mm (the thickest place is 7.4 mm); when closed, the fuselage narrows to 74.47 mm, and the thickness will increase to 14.57 mm (the thinnest).
Of course, whether the phone is in the folded state or unfolded state, the weight is unchanged, 311 grams, relative to the conventional straight phone This weight belongs to the overweight level, put in the folding screen mobile phone is actually good, but it can not be described as light. If the phone is unfolded, it is very difficult to hold it with one hand, and it will be much easier to fold it.
It came later, but it was also more mature
Compared with several other head domestic brands, vivo's entry into the folding screen mobile phone time belongs to a relatively late one, and theoretically it has not taken the lead. But emerging markets provide enough opportunities for "players", and the key to seizing the opportunity lies in who can make a mature enough product earlier, which is also the key to competing for a larger user base.
And what we can see on the vivo X Fold product is actually the word "mature". Its maturity is not only excellent internal and external screen quality, screen fingerprint and imaging capabilities, but also reflected in the independent HiFi chip, multi-function NFC, X-axis linear motor, Bluetooth 5.2, independent physical silence quiet and other details, almost meet all the current people's expectations for folding screen mobile phones.
Excellent product power, coupled with the "ultra-low" pricing of 8999 yuan, we believe that whether you are a business person or not, vivo X Fold is the most worthwhile folding screen mobile phone at this stage, or even one of them.
This article was originally published by Geek Park GeekPark, please add Geek Jun (ID: geekchoiecs).