Vivo NEX 3S 5G goes official in China with incremental hardware upgrades

Vivo has taken the wraps off the NEX 3S 5G, the flagship follow-up to the NEX 3 that came out last year. As the name suggests, the NEX 3S 5G is an incremental upgrade over the predecessor and now rocks 5G support. The phone keeps the design similar to the NEX 3 but brings the latest hardware under the hood. There's the Snapdragon 865 SoC with the integrated 5G modem, LPDDR5 RAM and UFS 3.1 storage, the most obvious hardware combination that gives flagship phones their name.

Moreover, the NEX 3 retains the waterfall AMOLED display that curves sharply in the edges along with on-screen haptic controls replacing the volume rockers and the power buttons. The display now comes with HDR10+ certification, an improvement over the predecessor. The display stretches all the way to the edges without a notch or any other interruption with the front camera tucked into a pop-up module. Vivo claimed an impressive 99.6% screen-to-body ratio. Also, surprisingly the NEX 3S 5G comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack.

The NEX 3S 5G boasts of a triple camera setup at the back while the pop-up module houses a 16MP with an f/2.0 aperture. At the back, the primary camera has a 64MP sensor with f/1.8 aperture which relies on pixel-binning to output 16MP photos. Additionally, there's another 13MP wide-angle camera and another 13MP telephoto lens with up to 20x digital zoom.

The phone is powered by a 4,500mAh battery that supports Vivo's proprietary 44W fast charging. The phone runs on Android 10-based FunTouchOS 10.

Flagships smartphones also command premium prices and the NEX 3S 5G is no different. The handset is only available in China. Vivo is offering three colour variants — Sky Blue, Black and Orange.