Fingerprint reader that spans half the screen?! Vivo APEX concept phone hands-on

At this year's Mobile World Congress Vivo announced a new concept smartphone that features a few stunning innovations, it's called the vivo Apex full view, full view because it has the world's highest screen to body ratio at a extreme 98 percent.

The goal of creating an all screen phone has led Vivo to a number of technical innovations like a more flexible microchip platform allowing for more space inside of the phone, it has also forced a company to push smartphone design towards a very interesting future.

Building on Vivo’s existing tech for Indisplay fingerprint scanning, the entire bottom half of the screen is a fingerprint reader, it can register one fingerprint or two simultaneously if you're into that, however due to limited algorithm and processing power if you've already registered one finger for a single print scanning the phone won't allow you to use it for double print scanning, for now the double digit security system isn't as reliable as it could be and although the single digit registration is better, it still doesn't recognize your finger a hundred percent of the time, you also have to press the screen a little harder than you would a regular scanner when it does work it's about as fast as their previous and display reader which is to say decently fast but nowhere close to current flagship speed.

A common challenge for all screen phones is selfie camera placement, on this concept device it lies hidden out of sight, when you need it pops out in point eight seconds watching it go up and down is surprisingly satisfying.

Since there was no space for an earpiece the phone's entire OLED display acts as one similar to what we had in the Xiaomi Mi Mix, Vivo calls this screen sound casting. The In-call sound comes through clean and clear but since the entire phone vibrates to produce sound everyone around you can listen in on your conversations, for listening to music the phone has a regular loudspeaker on the bottom however since the phone has a triple DAC set up listening to music with headphones should be quite enjoyable.

It too has been redesigned with space in mind allowing for a bigger battery and better cooling, for now the vivo apex full-view has no official specs and is entirely a concept device which means it's unlikely that we'll see it in stores anytime soon, that said we'll likely see at least some of its features on other devices from Vivo, Oppo or Oneplus in the future.