Chinese smartphone maker Vivo teases Super FlashCharge tech that can charge a 4,000mAh phone in 13 minutes

Vivo might not be a familiar brand in this part of the world, but it’s one of the Chinese smartphone companies that have been pushing the boundaries in terms of what phones look like and how they perform. You might be more familiar with its sister brand: OnePlus. (Vivo, OnePlus, and OPPO are all owned by Chinese multinational corporation BBK.) But we digress, our focus is on the latest technology Vivo is bringing to the market, which blows what its sister company OPPO has done with the Find X Lamborghini Edition. A Vivo product manager posted on Chinese blogging site Weibo its new Super FlashCharge 120W technology. It promises to fully charge a 4,000mAh phone battery in just 13 minutes. As we mentioned, the special edition Find X, with its Super VOOC charger, can fill up its 3,400mAh battery in 35 minutes.

The video only shows a phone charging from around 10 to 14 percent in 16 seconds, so we can’t say yet how true the claims are. But the company is set to go into detail about this technology at next week’s Mobile World Congress Shanghai, where it’ll also unveil its first 5G device.

Source: The Verge

The era of ‘hole-less’ phones is here

We’ve lost bezels and the occasional headphone jack as smartphone manufacturers attempt to innovate in their space. Admittedly, the ones who seem to be leading the charge in terms of design innovation now are the Chinese. The latest trend that might look to be the next big thing (aside from foldable phones) are “hole-less phones.” And two Chinese companies have already previewed what their take on this new trend is going to look like. 

Meizu is the first one out of the gate with the Meizu Zero. It has no headphone jack and the speaker grill is replaced by the screen acting as a speaker (similar to the Huawei Mate 20 Pro). It uses a piezoelectric transducer to turn the 5.99-inch display into a speaker. It uses tiny touch sensitive panels on the side to replace the power button and volume rocker, and it has an under-display fingerprint reader, too. Without any ports or holes, there is no SIM tray, so this phone will make use of an eSIM. File transfer and charging will be done wirelessly, too. To compensate for this, Meizu has a new wireless charging standard that promises to deliver speeds of up to 18 watts (which surpasses Huawei’s 15-watt spec). It also supports Bluetooth 5.0 and wireless USB connectivity that’s said to be as fast as USB 3.0. Without any holes, it stands that the Meizu Zero is IP68-certified, too. 

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Vivo pushes boundaries again with Apex concept phone

Vivo made a pretty big splash at CES early last month with its work with Synaptics by putting the fingerprint reader on the phone’s OLED display. The Chinese company looks to steal the spotlight yet again at Mobile World Congress with the new concept phone it’s showing off. Called the Apex, this nearly bezel-less phone has what Vivo is describing as a “half-screen in-display fingerprint scanning technology.” However, as The Verge points out, it’s more like taking up a third of the screen, which still isn’t bad idea. For extra security, sometimes you can enable the input of two different fingerprints to have it unlock the screen.

But what happens to the other key sensors you find out the phone? Vivo’s decided to make this come out at the top of the device like a periscope or pop-up flash when you turn the selfie camera on. A pretty nifty move. It takes less than a second for it to get ready for use. As for the earpiece speaker, Vivo’s approach is to make the entire screen vibrate itself like a speaker so you can hear calls even without completely holding the device close to your ear. Vivo says it doesn’t have plans to release an actual device based on this form but it does show us the possibility of this happening and almost completely bezel-less phones being in our near future.

Chinese brand Vivo might be the first to introduce an on-screen fingerprint sensor for its upcoming smartphone

While Vivo might be an unfamiliar name here, the Chinese manufacturer has been aggressively promoting its brand across Asia. And it looks like it’ll be leading the charge when it comes to introducing a device with an on-screen fingerprint sensor. A leaked video on Chinese microblogging site Weibo shows what looks like the Vivo X9 Plus but with the optical fingerprint sensor embedded into the screen itself. A report coming out of Korea reaffirms this claim but says Huawei will be the first to put on-screen fingerprint sensing on its device with the P11 and then they’ll be followed by Xiaomi and Vivo.

For this side of the world, though, Apple is said to be making this feature a mainstream requirement for phones with the upcoming release of the next iPhone. Samsung supposedly won’t have it ready in time for the release of the “Galaxy Note 8” because of “security vulnerabilities.”

Source: Android Central