Vivo flexes its muscles in Europe by making us smell the X Fold

Last week I was in the Vivo offices in Milan for a hands-on with Vivo X Fold, the first foldable smartphone of the Chinese company. Vivo’s offices are on the twenty-third and twenty-fourth floors of a tower in the Garibaldi area and from the terrace there is an impressive view of the city: from the video you find above you can get an idea (despite the slightly burnt sky, alas) .

Although it was practically unknown in our country until a few years ago, Vivo immediately presents itself as a strong company, which wants to share its latest gems such as the X Fold with the Italian press.

With Vivo X Fold I played it for an hour or so and it seemed like a awesome device, not so much for the super top of the range technical specifications (for those, if you want, they are all good), but for the structure of the device, the display, the frame, the hinge, the general solidity. All things that must be done really invest in research and development and it’s not enough to buy the best hardware on the market.

Vivo is not the only one to have pushed a lot on folding in recent years: there is obviously Samsung with the Z Fold and Z Flip lines, there is Motorola Razr, there is Huawei with its Mate Xs and there is also the small Oppo Find N. And these are just the ones we have auvto way to touch, without even looking at all the companies that have presented various prototypes and concepts.

And if we look at the current devices and compare them to that first Galaxy Z Fold that introduced the world to the concept of foldable, the result is merciless for Samsung’s folding: not because it was not an exceptional device for the time, but because in just three years the progress made in the folding sector is impressive.

We went through a surprising experience but all in all toyywith those plasticky displays and a noticeable crease in the middle, a truly experience premiumwith very solid bodies and hinges and an internal screen where the folding point is electrically invisible.

All for a type of device whose market share will be negligible: look around, how many of your friends have a foldable smartphone?

Precisely.

For this reason, it seems clear to me that the foldable sector is little more than an exercise in style for companies: it is not important to really sell them, it is important that we talk about them. It is important to plant your own flag, to show the world that you are on the piece and to be able to produce a solid and amazing device.

It is a question of prestigein short, and it is no coincidence that Vivo wanted to show the Vivo X Fold to all the Italian press despite this smartphone will not be on sale in Europe.

Because it is a “super device”, in the technical characteristics and in the user experience: of those that you can not help but say chapeau. I mean, read all the technical specifications in this launch article: among everything else, we find Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, 12 GB of RAM, 256 GB of UFS 3.1 internal memory, 6 (six!) Excellent cameras with lots of partnerships with Zeiss. And then obviously the large 8 “foldable display, with 2K resolution, 120 Hz refresh rate and A + certification from DisplayMate.

In short, we understood each other. And if the user experience intrigues you, take a look at the review of Vivo X80 Pro: they are two very different smartphones, of course, but they share different technical specifications, including the processor, the memories and the exceptional photographic sector.

But let’s talk about Vivo: who is this company that is showing muscles in Europe, with excellent top-of-the-range smartphones and noteworthy foldables?

Despite having arrived in Italy less than two years ago, Vivo is a giant of technology, with great experience in the smartphone sector. In China Vivo is one of the leading manufacturersin third or fourth place (depending on the analysis) for devices sold: it beats Apple, with a market share of about 17%.

Vivo was founded in 1995 and was the market leader in China for fixed telephony: it entered the smartphone market in 2011 and in 2014 it began expanding into the international market, starting from the Asian territory. It arrived in Europe in 2019 and, according to Counterpoint, ranks fifth in the global ranking for smartphones sold.

Furthermore, in recent years Vivo has made itself known in the western market thanks to very important sponsorships in the sports sector: let’s talk about agreements with FIFA for the 2018 and 2022 world championships and those with the UEFA for the Europeans of 2020 and 2024.

There would also be a partnership with Marvel (in Captain America: Civil WarSteve Rogers and Tony Stark used Vivo smartphones), but we understood each other.

The moral, in short, is that Vivo is here to stay and in the coming years we will hear a lot about it, more and more: Vivo X Fold is not just a great beautiful folding smartphone, it’s a business card to show to the European market.