Chinese phone-maker Vivo unveiled its X50 series on Thursday, marking the launch of its first global flagship this year. Vivo, which is one of…
Chinese phone-maker Vivo unveiled its X50 series on Thursday, marking the launch of its first global flagship this year. Vivo, which is one of the top 10 phone manufacturers by market share despite being relatively unknown in the West, advertises its latest phone as a «professional photography flagship.» It introduces an internal gimbal camera system to the series, which it’s selling outside China for the first time.
There are three phones in this range, the X50, X50 Pro and X50 Pro Plus. The X50 Pro has a cutting-edge Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor (as seen in the Galaxy S20, among others), while the X50 and the Pro both have Snapdragon 765G CPUs. But although the X50 Pro has a slower processor, it also has a gimbal. Vivo said it chose to add the gimbal to the Pro, rather than the more costly Pro Plus, to make the feature more widely accessible.
The company says the X50 Pro’s system has a 300% increase in performance over more traditional stabilization technology. That’s thanks in part to that gimbal, which uses a «double-ball structure to achieve triple axis rotation,» effectively letting the camera float inside the phone.
While only the X50 has the hyped-up gimbal, all three devices support 5G. All three phones have the same 6.56-inch displays, too. But there’s one other key difference: the processors these phones run on. The X50 Pro Plus gets the best CPU, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865, while the Pro and the X50 both run on a Snapdragon 765G.
Vivo says it doesn’t currently have plans to release the phone in the US. But X50 phones will be released in parts of Asia, Africa and Europe over the next three months, so they’ll be reasonably easy to import.
