Vivo has made a habit of showing off its Apex line of concept phones at Mobile World Congress for the past few years. But this year MWC was cancelled… but that didn’t stop Vivo from taking out ads in Barcelona where the show would have taken place.

So we have an idea of what this year’s Vivo Apex looks like… although whether it’ll make an official appearance next week remains to be seen.

Some journalists and tech industry folks are still arriving in Barcelona for meetings and ancillary press events that haven’t been cancelled. So people like David Ruddock and Yasuhiro Yamane have spotted ads at the airport for the 2020 version of the Vivo Apex.

While detailed specs aren’t available, some key details are written on the body of the phone, making it clear that it’s a 4G device with a 48MP camera with 5X to 7.5x optical zoom support.

It also has a some sort of “Gimbal” mechanism, which means it’ll have some sort of “pivoted support that allows the rotation of an object about a single axis,” for smoother camera stabilization.

That’s in keeping with a leak posted to Twitter by Ben Geskin earlier this month.

Does this mean that you’ll actually be able to buy a phone with a gimbal this year? Maybe… maybe not.

The original Vivo Apex debuted at MWC 2018 and it was the first smartphone to feature a pop-up selfie camera. A few months later that technology came to market in the first-gen Vivo Nex smartphone.

But in 2019 Vivo showed off an Apex concept phone with no physical ports or buttons. Instead it used a magnetic charger and capacitive touch buttons. So far that’s a design no phone maker has tried to use in a commercial device.

via xda-developers

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20 replies on “Vivo Apex 2020 concept phone has gimbal-stabilized camera (probably)”

  1. Brad, is there any way for a user to opt for the old theme for the site? I’m finding the new theme very difficult to parse visually.

    1. I’m still working out some of the kinks — but I’m trying to improved mobile usability and speed up page views on both mobile, desktop, and AMP versions of the site.

      What particular issues are you having?

      1. Brad…

        For myself…everything is too large…especially on the front page. I’m on a 15.6″ HP Probook 655. To give a specific example. The picture you have on the top of this article, plus the title? These cover my screen 100% from top to bottom. Too large.

        Everything just feels “too large” for my little laptop screen….almost like the scaling is off. This is screwing up the flow I’ve usually found on your site.

        Please understand…I’m trying to help, NOT criticize….I love your site! I stop by daily.

        Take care,

        Michael

        1. What’s your screen resolution? You should definitely be seeing more than that if you have a 1080p display.

          That said, I haven’t settled on the new design yet. I’m struggling to get a few things working the way I want them to, so if I can’t get things worked out by the end of the weekend, I might revert back to the old layout for a while.

          Stay tuned!

          1. I like the new theme. Font sizes are good on both 1080p and 4K monitors, but it’s a bit smaller on the 4K.

          2. Brad…

            The resolution is 1366×768. Take a good look at the “Latest Posts” area of OMG! Ubuntu! I think that format size/shape would be perfect for your site.

            Whatever you do…don’t go back though…always go forward.

            Smile,

            Michael

          3. I agree, it “feels off”.

            Reasons are probably that there’s slightly a little more blank space than needs to be. The fonts for somethings are different. The sub-heading is double spaced and capitalised which makes it hard to ignore but also hard to read. And the icons on the top right are very old, you need to update those icons to an HD Pack, because they’re pretty pixelated. This is all when viewing from Safari/OSX.

            On mobile, Firefox browser for Android, things look much tighter and visually better. However, again you need to update the logos. Another thing to point out is that the Liliputing Logo for the Home page is also low-resolution. It looks very weird on a modern device with 1440p or 4K resolution, since the lines, and characters scale to the sharpness. The article photos aren’t high resolution, but since the image size is decreased, they seem higher density and that helps. But yeah, go through all your logos, I think you can update them to their modern high-res versions.

          4. Very helpful, thanks! I just figured out the necessary CSS changes for the metadata (the time, date, author, and comment count), which I think is what you meant by sub-heading. I have a few more icky fonts to track down, and then I’ll either update those social icons or just fins some plugin to do it for me. 🙂

      2. The main one is size for me as well. I’m on a 1080p screen, but on a 13″ laptop. At my standard zoom level on Chrome (150%), a single news item is taller than my entire screen.

        If I lower the zoom to say, 100%, I still do not get more than one and a half news items per screen height, but the fonts are far too small to read.

        Basically, the issue is on laptop screens at least, the featured image for a story needs to be besides it, not on top of it.

        If you still want the picture to go on top on mobile, you’d need to do some responsive design with aspect ratio media queries.

        The other issue is more one of taste, so I guess I won’t be able to hold it against you but: I HATE serifs. My issues aside though, it is generally accepted that sans fonts are preferable on the web because they are easier to read on screens. Conventional wisdom has it that serifs are conversely easier to read on paper, but I would not like them there either.

        Thanks for taking feedback though. Very cool!

        1. The theme I’m using is full of serif fonts (and Google fonts), but I’m gradually tracking them down and changing them to font-family: sans-serif so that users will see whatever default their OS uses. Just figured out how to change metadata, so that’s one more gone. 🙂

          As for the image size/header, I’m still trying to find the happiest middle ground. Out of the box, this theme had an enormous header image on the homepage, but I removed that to decrease the unused space at the top of the page. I’m working on finding the best solution for article pages.

          1. Thanks for the work on fonts. It really does show, and it’s a lot easier on the eyes now. Also on the zoom levels of elements on the main page.

            Still think there is room to reduce the vertical height thing that images do especially on a wide (read laptop or desktop) screen. Or do a responsive design where on wide aspect ratio screens the images go besides the post short text one sees on the main page. But the site is notably easier to parse now. Thanks!

          2. Yeah, the design is responsive — but a few things are tricky to alter. I can easily set images to show above the post on the homepage and other archive pages, or set them to align right or left. But when I do that, the headline has a nasty habit of wrapping around the image, which just looks dumb.

            My current compromise is to display images above the post, but crop them at 250px. If I can figure out a way to right-align the images so that they post excerpt text wraps around them rather than the headline, I’ll probably do that instead.

          3. Actually, I think I did just figure that out. I’m not 100-percent happy with the way it was implemented, because it could break if there’s a future update to the theme. But it works for now!

      3. Well, I’ve noticed that the site content looks fine on every desktop version of firefox I’ve tried at 70% zoom, but the comments section looks better at 100% zoom.
        I’d suggest CSS Hero if you want to dynamically change things based on browser aspect ratio but you might be using that already and it’s not like I really know what I’m talking about.

    1. Good for low light but not for movement. A bigger sensor would cover both situations but this appears to have a midrange sensor.

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