Vivo debuted a new smartphone today, the Vivo V9 model, that clearly focuses on selfies and keeping a modern design approach via that all too famous notch. The Vivo V9 packs a 24 megapixel front camera and a 16 MP + 5 MP dual back camera. Both of them have AI features, which trigger Portrait modes.
Inside the Vivo V9 we find a Qualcomm Snapdragon 626 processor, together with 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage. There’s also Android 8.1 Oreo in the mix here, with Vivo’s UI skin on top. Upfront we find a 19:9 screen, a 6.3 inch IPS LCD with narrow bezel and top side notch. The notch hides both the selfie camera and the sensors, but there’s also the earpiece there. The front cam provides an AI Face Access feature, which lets you unlock the Vivo V9 using your face instead of the fingerprint scanner at the back side.
AI Face Access is basically an upgraded Android Face Recognition. The novelty is Attention Sensing, which monitors if the user is looking at the phone or not, which is something that Apple’s Face ID is also doing on the iPhone X. The handset’s AI Face Beauty is able to predict age, sex, skin tone, texture and lighting, dramatically improving portrait shots. This AI mechanism was improved by learning from a database of 1 million faces.
Interestingly even some of the cool Portrait Lighting effects from the iPhone X were borrowed: Natural Light, Studio Light, Stereo Light and Monochrome Background. We don’t have a price for the Vivo V9, but we know it’s meant to be the company’s flagship in markets like India for example. The product will come in black and gold versions. Android 8.1 is the OS here.
