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Vivo's new V9 flagship has a notch and a 24-megapixel selfie camera

Vivo's new V9 flagship has a notch and a 24-megapixel selfie camera

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Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge
Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge

Vivo has announced its latest flagship phone, the V9, and no surprises — there’s a notch. The V9 has a 6.3-inch 2280 x 1080 LCD with a 19:9 aspect ratio; Vivo says the notch helps achieve a screen-to-body ratio of 90 percent.

The V9’s spec sheet is pretty standard, for the most part: there’s a Snapdragon 626 processor, 4GB of RAM, a 3260mAh battery, 64GB of storage, a microSD card slot, a Micro USB port, and a headphone jack. The phone runs Vivo’s Funtouch OS 4.0 skin atop Android 8.1 Oreo.

The camera system has a primary 16-megapixel sensor and f/2 lens paired with a secondary 5-megapixel unit for depth information and blurry backgrounds. As it often does, though, Vivo is prioritizing selfies — this time with a 24-megapixel f/2 front-facing camera.

If you’re thinking that might be a little too much detail for a flattering selfie, Vivo believes AI is the answer. A feature called AI Face Beauty uses machine learning to identify users’ age, sex, skin tone, and texture in order to “truly represent their beauty,” as the company puts it. There’s also a selfie lighting feature that sounds very similar to what Apple introduced on the iPhone X and 8, though Vivo is attempting to pull it off with a single (albeit high-resolution) camera. Stay tuned for how that works out.

vivo v9

Vivo is claiming that AI boosts the phone’s performance in general through what it calls the “AI Smart Engine,” handling things like storage management and app launching based on the user’s behavior. “AI Face Access” is said to improve the accuracy of the face unlock feature, while “AI Attention Sensing” recognizes when you’re looking at the screen and reduces the volume of notifications accordingly. These features wouldn’t have been labeled as AI on other phones a few years ago, but hey, 2018.

The V9 will be Vivo's new flagship phone in India

The V9 will serve as Vivo’s new flagship phone in India and other markets, but this week the company also announced a similar, slightly higher-end flagship for China, the X21. It shares industrial design with the V9 but has a Snapdragon 660 processor, 12-megapixel cameras on front and back, and an OLED screen. The X21 also has an option for an in-display fingerprint scanner, this time provided by Chinese company Goodix rather than previous partner Synaptics.

The V9 will be available imminently in black and gold variants; we’ll update with pricing info as soon as we have it.