When we think of smartphones we think it’s the United States that leads the pack not only for the Americas, but for the entire world. However, that’s a very narrow-minded approach to assessing the current phone market globally. The Asians create some super devices manufactured in their homeland that aren’t the usual household names such as Sony, HTC and Samsung. Those names are huge out west and even larger back in their home nations. Now there’s a new name they all must contend with.
After weeks of deliberation, there’s officially a new thinnest smartphone in town. The Vivo X5 Max was unveiled to the world with a record thickness of just 4.75mm. That makes it officially the thinnest smartphone in the world. Since we are closing in on the last few weeks of 2014, it’s likely we don’t see it taken from top spot until sometime during 2015.
Most modern-day phone manufacturers present stories to the media such as “thinner isn’t always better,” and act as if they could make their current range thinner if they wanted to. There is some truth to that. We do live behind the technological times by a bit, but that doesn’t mean a company can easily carry out anything in their design stages. Putting it into practice is difficult and I believe if Apple could create a thinner smartphone they would.
Vivo is a brand you won’t be forgetting any time soon. So how did they make such a narrow design come to fruition? Vivo engineered a custom motherboard 1.7mm thin. The display is Super AMOLED at 1.36mm. You may remember the Super AMOLED name since it is used in some of the top-end devices from Samsung such as the Samsung Galaxy S5. Moreover, the custom chassis are the thinnest on the market at 3.98mm.
The full break-down includes 5.5-inch 1920 x 1080 display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 octa-core system chip, 4G LTE speed, 64-bit architecture, 2GB RAM, 16GB ROM, Sony IMX214 Exmor RS sensor inside a 13 megapixel rear-facing snapper and a 5 megapixels coming from the front. In addition to those blockbuster features, it comes with a YAMAHA YSS-205X Karaoke chip, Hi-Fi 2.0, dual-SIM card and Android 4.4.4 KitKat software. We are witnessing Android 5.0 Lollipop rolling out to many devices now and a further Android 5.0.1 Lollipop is rolling OTA to a select few.
Chinese customers are buying the Vivo X5 Max starting from the 22nd of December. Pricing starts at 2999 RMB. Since parts of China do celebrate Christmas in the major cities, it will be a quick sell to have this phone under the Christmas tree. That’s not Vivo’s concern, though. Since only one percent of the Chinese are Christian, most of their sales will come from other festivities and regular sales from shoppers interested in a new phone.
We aren’t predicting the X5 Max to make its way out West to our shores in Australia or to our friends over in the United States. However, no doubt we’ll see some similar technology in our next-generation devices, and that’s surly a good thing. We do know one thing: it will take a dent out of Xiaomi sales.
The first country to find the X5 max is reportedly India, who are seeing it hit shelves on December 15. That’s a full week before China. There’s no listing price yet for India. It’s the debut device for Vivo in India and they are keeping tip lipped about the price. Whether it’s yet to be decided is unknown at this time.
It looks a great deal like the iPhone 6 to us. Let us know what you think in the comments. Are you planning on purchasing this handset?