Vivo NEX 3S 5G goes official with Snapdragon 865 led system overhaul

Vivo is back with a decent performance update for its flagship Nex 3 from 2019. The new 2020 Nex 3S 5G follows an approach that Apple users will be familiar with where the design from a previous year has largely been carried over in favor of predominantly internal upgrades. It makes sense from a design perspective as it compares well with flagship smartphones launched so far this year with relatively minimal bezels while it continues with the pop-up front facing camera arrangement that Vivo was one of the first to pioneer.

As expected, the key changes lie under its skin with Vivo focused on delivering improved overall performance through an underlying system architecture upgrade. This is of course centered around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865 SoC, which offers a 25 boost in processing performance and a 25 percent boost in graphics performance over the Snapdragon 855. RAM has also been upgraded to LPDDR5 from LPDDR4X -- that mightn’t seem that significant, but it boosts memory bandwidth by 29 percent. Vivo has also upgraded the storage from UFS 3.0 to UFS 3.1 which offers reduced power consumption and improved performance.

Although Vivo continues with the same 64 MP main sensor with f/1.8 aperture, 13 MP f2.5 telephoto and 13 MP f/2.2 ultrawide shooters, all should deliver improved performance thanks the improved image processing capabilities of the Snapdragon 865. Although the Super AMOLED ‘waterfall’ display remains largely unchanged at 6.89-inches, it has been upgraded to support HDR10+, up from standard HDR10. Keeping things interesting, Vivo has added a new orange color which joins the familiar black and blue colors found on the original Nex 3.

The Vivo Nex 3S 5G will ship in China on March 14 starting at around US$720 which will nab you an 8 GB/256 GB model and around US$760 for the 12 GB/256 GB variant.