by Author | Safari
In 2023, on the one hand, the smartphone market has entered a “half-life period” and the overall sales volume has declined. On the other hand, the market share of smartphones above 4,000 yuan has continued to grow. Today’s smartphone market has entered a new stage that is more complicated than the “Red Sea”.
For vivo, with the success of vivo’s candy bar flagship X90 series, the vivo X Fold series has also become a masterpiece of “all-round folding screen flagship”, but for vivo, it wants to continue to stabilize in the high-end flagship market in 2023 A good enough folding screen flagship is almost the only way for vivo.
So before the official arrival of vivo’s candy bar flagship, we first saw the debut of vivo’s new folding screen products this year-vivo X Fold2 and vivo X Flip. Among them, the former is undoubtedly the one that best represents the flagship level of vivo in the field of folding screens.
01Exterior
Vivo X Fold2 has three appearance colors of “Azure Blue”, “Huaxia Red” and “String Shadow Black”. The body theme adopts the stitching process of plain glass material that has become more and more popular in the design of flagship mobile phones in the past two years. Interconnected and integrated, ZEISS and vivo Logo are added as embellishments. At the same time, on the glass material part behind the fuselage of the “Huaxia Red” version, you can also vaguely see the special “Landscape Painting A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains” texture, which constitutes the most oriental color among the three color schemes.
Image source: Geek Park
The family-style design language of vivo’s “round sky and place” has been inherited in a different but still iconic way on the vivo X Fold2: with the design elements of vivo’s flagship mobile phone such as plain leather and color matching, You can undoubtedly recognize it as a flagship phone from vivo.
Image source: Geek Park
In terms of other specifications of the fuselage, compared with the original vivo X Fold, vivo X Fold2 has significantly slimmed down the thickness of the fuselage: the thickness of the fuselage has been narrowed from 14.57mm to 12.9mm, and the unfolded thickness has been thinned from 6.28 to 6.07mm. Vivo X Fold2 has also achieved a significant weight reduction in body weight, from 310g to 278g.
Image source: Geek Park
These paper data may be a little thin to read, but if you have tried vivo X Fold before, you can clearly feel the difference in weight when you pick up vivo X Fold2. Or use more intuitive comparison data: the weight of the iPhone 14 Pro is 240g, and the vivo X Fold2 is only one step away from the weight of the mainstream candy bar flagship. All of these make vivo X Fold2 more like a “flagship phone” even when the inner screen is not unfolded.
02Screen
Vivo X Fold2 uses a 21:9 ratio external screen. Nowadays, this screen size is more and more appearing in the design of mainstream candy bar flagship mobile phones. In addition, the thickness of vivo X Fold2 has become thinner and thinner. The daily use of the external screen of vivo X Fold2 will not be because of its “folding”. “Screen” attribute, which brings too much strangeness to the use of external screens.
Image source: Geek Park
The inner screen is an 8.03-inch screen, which also supports LTPO 4.0, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. The 4:3 ratio is also suitable for quick switching between office work/reading documents and watching videos.
Image source: Geek Park
One of the distinctive highlights of the vivo X Fold series is that although folding screen phones generally focus on the use of the internal screen, the vivo X Fold2 does the opposite, using two 2K resolution Samsung E6 screens , and both the inner and outer screens are 120Hz. This strategy directly solves the problem of inconsistency between the inner and outer screens of many folding screen phones in the past. Standalone App is the same.
Image source: Geek Park
The battery capacity of vivo X Fold2 has been increased from 4600mAh of the previous generation to 4800mAh, and the wired charging power has also been increased from 66W dual-battery fast charging to 120W dual-battery fast charging. In actual use, it can be fully charged in an average of about 27 minutes. Wireless charging supports up to 50W. Although wireless charging is more suitable for usage scenarios that do not pursue charging speed so much, it can also achieve charging from 0% to 100% within 50 minutes.
Image source: Geek Park
03video experience
This imaging experience is also the focus of the vivo X Fold2 upgrade: vivo X Fold2 is equipped with a 50MP IMX866 VCS main camera + 12MP IMX663 ultra-wide-angle, and a 12MP IMX663 portrait lens. The entire series of lenses are equipped with Zeiss T* coating with excellent anti-glare capabilities. The actual shooting style is still the familiar vivo X series style, and the color traces after the blessing of “Zeiss Natural Color” technology can be clearly seen.
Image source: Geek Park
In addition to the original Zeiss lens package including Zeiss Biotar style blur, Zeiss Distagon style blur, Zeiss Sonnar style blur, Zeiss Planar style blur, etc., this time the vivo X Fold2 has also been updated to add the Zeiss Cinematic movie mode, which can Automatically switch the focus during video shooting, while retaining the ability to adjust the focus during post-editing of the album, bringing a movie-like shooting mirror effect.
04hinge structure
If the experience of hardware/software determines the use experience of a candy bar flagship in all aspects, then the use experience of a folding screen mobile phone is inseparable from another special component-the improvement of the hinge structure.
For any folding screen mobile phone, the hinge structure under the screen is the “basic skill” that pulls the whole body: the hinge hardware directly determines the user experience of the folding screen structure, and more directly determines the weight that is closely related to the mobile phone experience.
As mentioned earlier, the body weight of the vivo X Fold2 has been greatly reduced, which is close to the level of the traditional straight flagship. To a large extent, it is also due to the further optimization of the folding hinge structure: the aviation-grade water drop hinge can not only use less At the same time, on the basis of the “drop-shaped” hinge structure that has become popular today, the hinge rotation diameter of vivo X Fold2 is further enlarged and upgraded, making the crease shallower and smoother, and supporting vivo X Fold2 can achieve 60°-120° ° free hovering.
Under the improvement of these combined punches. Although the vivo X Fold2 still cannot completely eliminate the creases of the screen (limited by the water drop folding structure, there is currently no folding screen mobile phone that can be completely crease-free), but it has indeed greatly optimized the folding screen that affects the quality of the screen. The overall visual effect is more immersive, and it has reached a folding life of 400,000 times.
In actual use, a sufficiently stable hinge structure is also the advantage that makes the folding screen mobile phone more unique: it can not only act as a touchpad in PC mode, automatically enter the folding mode in the adapted application, but also automatically When watching a movie, use the hinge as a self-contained mobile phone stand, and use the stable hovering angle to fix the mobile phone screen angle to watch videos.
Image source: Geek Park
The hovering scene of the folding screen has always been the focus of the development of the shooting function. The vivo X Fold2 can also use the hovering structure with the camera software function to realize the hovering shooting and the waist screen viewfinder mode. Free your hands and don’t need auxiliary tools such as tripods.
Image source: Geek Park
05software experience
As early as when the vivo X Fold was released, vivo put a lot of focus on the development of folding screen mobile phones to meet the needs of business people: not only has a “quantum suite” for cross-device scenarios, it can ensure that no matter what brand you use. PC notebooks can be used together to achieve cross-terminal collaborative use, and there are packages such as Atom Reading, Atom Notes, and Email.
Image source: Geek Park
Vivo is also cooperating with platforms such as Oriental Fortune, WPS, Tiger Securities, Flush, and Futu Niu Niu this time. Aiming at the operation logic of the folding screen and the inner screen, it adapts and optimizes the App operation experience, which can increase the efficiency of use for business users. Got a lot of improvements.
06Summarize
In addition to the text test experience, we also shot a short video of the actual hands-on experience to intuitively feel the vivo X Fold2 from more angles:
The category of folding screen mobile phones still has the characteristics of the early development of smartphones: the key technology is still in the exploratory stage, so it is full of fierce competition and changes in the pattern brought about by exploration, but looking at the update points of the entire vivo X Fold2, I think It can be summed up in one sentence: “The body of the folding screen challenges the soul of the flagship of the candy bar.”
The vivo X Fold2 is indeed a summary of vivo’s concept of the flagship folding screen mobile phone: from the perspective of design, screen, performance, and battery life, the vivo X Fold2 presents a new experience. It can be said that vivo is in the field of folding screens. A “masterpiece”.
vivo X Fold2 does not bring an innovative user experience to today’s folding screens or flagship phones, but it uses the most comprehensive hardware/software level at present to create a folding screen flagship with almost no shortcomings.
Image source: Geek Park
Even if you put aside all the implication given to this phone by the “folding screen”, the vivo X Fold2 can still be a good enough flagship phone. This is enough, and perhaps the next step in vivo’s high-end exploration is in it.
