The Vivo X Fold has a fingerprint reader on both screens

Following the likes of Samsung, Huawei (and Honor), Motorola, Xiaomi and Oppo, we have a new contender in the foldable smartphone market. As reported by Engadget Chinese earlier today, the Vivo X Fold is the first of its kind to pack not only Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor, but also an under-display fingerprint reader — the ultrasonic kind — on both its main and external screens (instead of having a side-mounted capacitive sensor like other foldables). Sadly, this device is only available in China for now.

Vivo

Much like the Huawei Mate X2 and the Oppo Find N, the X Fold also adopted a water-drop flexion hinge design to achieve a gapless fold while minimizing its foldable AMOLED panel’s crease. But Vivo took things one step further: when opened, a zirconium alloy floating middle plate rises up to gently push against the flexible panel, thus smoothing out the remaining crease. While this sounds impressive, we’ll have to see it in person to believe it.

According to TÜV Rheinland, Vivo’s X Fold can survive over 300,000 folds — 100,000 more than Oppo Find N’s certification. Assuming an average user would open and close a foldable phone 80 times a day, the X Fold should be good for around 10 years of daily usage. That is, of course, assuming you can tolerate the 311g weight for that long; Samsung and Huawei’s latest large-size foldables only weigh 271g and 295g, respectively.

Vivo

For a foldable phone, the Vivo X Fold packs a surprisingly powerful set of cameras. For one, this is only the second foldable phone to carry a periscopic zoom camera (8MP, 5x optical zoom, optical stabilization), after Huawei’s Mate X2. The X Fold also comes with a 50MP main camera (Samsung GN5 sensor, f/1.75, optical stabilization), a 48MP ultra-wide camera (Sony IMX598, f/2.2, 114-degree field of view, low distortion) and a 12MP portrait camera (IMX663, f/1.98, 47mm equivalent focal length). And yes, you get Zeiss T* coating here for its anti-glare properties. It’s a similar setup to the X70 Pro+, except for the lack of micro-gimbal and missing optical stabilization on two of the cameras.

Vivo

In terms of screen aspect ratio, Vivo settled on somewhere between the tall Galaxy Z Fold 3 and the wide Oppo Find N. The external screen is a 6.53-inch 2,520 x 1,080 (21:9) panel, while the main screen features an 8-inch 2,160 x 1,916 (4:3.55) panel. Both are of Samsung E5 AMOLED nature and support up to 120Hz refresh rate, but only the bigger panel features adaptive refresh rate to further save power. These screens also pack their own 16MP f/2.45 selfie cameras, though you can always open the phone and toggle the “rear selfie” mode to leverage the more powerful cameras instead.

Like its competitors, some of the X Fold’s built-in apps — tucked inside the Android 12-based OriginOS Ocean —…