Hyper Track | vivo: This time we are challenging Apple!

Author: Zhou Yuan / Wall Street News

Challenger vivo, this time, has set its sights on Apple.

As a super dark horse in the domestic high-end flagship market in recent years, on October 14th, vivo launched the annual flagship vivo X200 series, engaging in a "peak showdown" with the iPhone 16 series.

This is the first time in vivo's history that it has directly challenged Apple's flagship. So, where does vivo get the confidence to dare to challenge Apple head-on?

The confidence comes from the upgraded "One Super, Multi-Ability" core product power created by Blue Technology, including the Thanos-level imaging performance, the Blue Heart XiaoV evolved to "Personal AI Intelligent Entity", and the new experience brought by multi-dimensional new technological performance in communication, battery, screen, and AI algorithms. This makes the top-of-the-line model vivo X200 Pro in the vivo X200 series become a strong challenger to the iPhone 16 series.

Wall Street News exclusively learned from the supply chain that guided by vivo's "user-oriented innovation" research ideology, the vivo X100 series implements a combination of software and hardware technology and product strategies. After the two are integrated, the vivo X100 series achieved explosive sales, becoming the most successful model in the vivo X series in terms of sales volume, entering the top three in sales of domestic high-end flagships.

After achieving success in the high-end flagship market, with the overall recovery and growth of the smartphone market, vivo has taken the top spot in China's mobile phone sales for three consecutive years. In the first, second, and third quarters of this year, vivo successively won the championship in China's mobile phone sales, and is highly likely to challenge for the top spot in sales in 2024.

In other words, vivo has achieved all-round breakthroughs in both the high-end flagship market and the overall market.

All of this proves that vivo has always adhered to user-oriented innovation, and its research and development strategy that prioritizes user needs and experiences has been highly validated by the market.

What aspects have been upgraded in the imaging experience

The model that best represents the technical capabilities of the vivo X200 series is undoubtedly the top-of-the-line model - vivo X200 Pro.

This new high-end flagship, also the first flagship model of domestic brands in the second half of this year, has become the first domestic flagship to meet head-on with the iPhone 16 series models that were just launched and went on sale on September 20th.

The vivo X200 Pro has many technological highlights and innovations. These innovations can be roughly divided into five parts: imaging, performance, battery life, screen, and AI (intelligence). Among them, AI mainly includes the further evolution of the OriginOS operating system and the AI reconstruction of intelligent experience, which belong to the software part of vivo's technological brand "Blue Technology".

Imaging capability has always been a strong point of the vivo X series and a killer feature that establishes the market position of this series. Truth be told, in terms of imaging experience, surpassing the vivo X100 Ultra is difficult to imagine how vivo will do it.

From the presentation of the vivo X200 Pro's imaging part at the launch event, it can be seen that this model, while maintaining its strong imaging performance, focuses on breakthroughs in full-focus portrait photography This can also be understood that the telephoto performance of the vivo X100 Pro has reached its peak, making it difficult to achieve significant performance breakthroughs. While going from a score of 85 to 99 is not easy, going from 99 to 100 is actually even harder.

The vivo X200 Pro is equipped with a Zeiss 200 million APO super telephoto lens, jointly defined blueprint × Sony LYT-818, along with outstanding flagship imaging configurations such as the blueprint image chip V3+ and vivo's self-developed algorithm matrix, bringing a new iteration of Ultra-level image experience.

The APO super telephoto lens is a familiar feature in the vivo X series, previously seen in the vivo X100 Pro and vivo X100 Ultra; the former with 50 million pixels and the latter with 200 million pixels.

This telephoto lens, certified by Zeiss APO, was a major breakthrough in the vivo imaging system when it was introduced in the vivo X100 Pro last year.

While maintaining the excellent experience of shooting the sun directly without glare in the vivo X100 Pro and vivo X100 Ultra, the vivo X200 Pro also achieves a sense of perspective and image compression in the 135mm and 85mm focal lengths, realizing full focal range portraits and providing more diverse options for portrait photography.

Different from the emphasis on landscape photography performance in the vivo X100 Pro—such as shooting the sun directly, it is evident that the vivo X200 Pro has improved portrait photography and video performance, such as full focal range portrait motion capture and new video super-resolution.

To this end, vivo has newly developed a dual-stream motion algorithm: while ensuring clear and lossless image quality, it increases the shutter speed by 4-6 stops, providing users with better zero latency, focus tracking, and motion blur effects.

Wall Street News noted that the main camera sensor carried by the vivo X200 Pro is the Sony LYT-818, with a photosensitive area size of 1/1.28 inches, which is Sony's first image sensor with new High Dynamic Range (HDR) function launched on September 25.

With the support of Ultra High Conversion Gain (UHCG) and HDR functions, the LYT-818 can achieve low-noise imaging even in dim environments, providing users with a purer and clearer night shooting experience; at the same time, HDR also supports a single-frame dynamic range of 86dB, accurately capturing image information in complex lighting environments through intelligent fusion of multiple gains, bringing more vivid and realistic imaging effects.

The UHCG technology of LYT-818 can reduce random noise (RN) to an unprecedented level of 0.95e-; and the HDR technology, by using three precisely designed gain settings, can accurately capture image information in a single exposure and significantly reduce dynamic artifacts through intelligent synthesis technology, such as ghosting, making photos and videos in motion scenes smoother and clearer.

These are the most amazing technical features of LYT-818, which can provide an imaging experience no less than IMX989. The reason why the vivo X200 Pro, despite having a smaller main camera sensor size than the IMX989, can still achieve imaging capabilities (static shooting and dynamic video) is because it is equipped with this brand new sensor jointly defined with Sony, which can deliver outstanding image performance The Rise of Vivo.

BlueHeart XiaoV Evolves into an AI Intelligent Entity

Starting from the vivo X100 series, the focus of vivo's flagship phone launch events has shifted from the phone itself to the vivo technology brand - Blue Technology (comprising Blue Crystal Chip Technology Stack, BluePrint Imaging, Blue Ocean Endurance System, BlueHeart Large Model, and Blue River Operating System).

What are the technological iterations of vivo's Blue Technology this time?

The most significant highlight is undoubtedly the second-generation 3nm Dimensity 9400 5G SoC chip jointly defined and tuned with MediaTek. The vivo X200 Pro is the world's first high-end flagship model to be equipped with the Dimensity 9400.

MediaTek's official definition of the Dimensity 9400 is a "flagship 5G intelligent entity AI chip." Therefore, the AI capabilities of the vivo X200 Pro equipped with the Dimensity 9400 have also been upgraded to a personal AI intelligent entity, taking the form of "BlueHeart XiaoV." Through the built-in vivo self-developed BlueHeart Large Model in OriginOS 5, it achieves a new interaction based on user intent understanding.

Key technological highlights of the Dimensity 9400: upgrading traditional AI applications to a better intelligent entity AI application - integrating the MediaTek Dimensity Agentic AI Engine, the Dimensity 9400 can upgrade traditional AI applications to more advanced intelligent entity AI applications.

For example, utilizing the user's 6 hours of sleep at night, through the training capability of the Dimensity 9400 NPU, the phone can perform some low-power training; when the user wakes up, the phone will understand the user better. Over time, the user's phone will become their personal intelligent entity.

Therefore, vivo and MediaTek's joint definition of the SoC chip's capabilities is a solid foundation for enhancing various performance aspects of the vivo X series flagship, including AI.

As the personal exclusive assistant for vivo X200 Pro users, the personal AI intelligent entity BlueHeart XiaoV has also been upgraded in text, image search, encyclopedia-style Q&A, writing generation, image generation, and app interaction, among other generative AI applications.

Among them, image search has been upgraded to "global invocation, precise selection": based on the selected content, BlueHeart XiaoV actively pushes related services, including encyclopedia introductions, schedule creation, translation, collection, document generation, and article summaries.

From the experience upgrade of BlueHeart XiaoV in the vivo X200 Pro, it can be seen that Blue Technology has achieved significant technological and experiential iterations: the underlying core guiding ideology has evolved to - technology is no longer cold technology but a true partner in serving people.

For example, the vivo X200 series debuted kilometer-level offline communication, solving communication needs in offline environments and providing strong support for wilderness scientific expeditions, disaster relief, and more; at the same time, the X200 series introduced "vivo Vision" and other barrier-free functions, effectively turning the vivo X200 series into the "eyes" for the visually impaired, addressing many inconveniences in the lives of people with disabilities vivo once summarized its R&D concept as "centered around user-oriented demands, focusing on technological innovation, and forming an innovative R&D supported by industrial thinking", namely "user-oriented innovation".

The key starting point of this innovative thinking lies in what kind of value the product can create for users, rather than breaking through limits at the engineering level.

Do these R&D principles really work?

This can be observed from the market performance of the vivo X100 series, as the vivo X100 series also adheres to this set of R&D principles.

According to exclusive information from the supply chain obtained by Wall Street News, since its launch until October 11th, the vivo X100 series has achieved explosive sales, becoming the most successful model in the vivo X series and successfully entering the top three in sales of domestic high-end flagship models.

Considering vivo's consecutive three-year dominance in the Chinese mobile phone market sales (vivo has successively won the sales champion in the Chinese market in the first, second, and third quarters this year), vivo has successfully achieved a breakthrough in the high-end market and an all-round breakthrough in the overall market.

From this perspective, vivo is accelerating its growth into a new technological giant. Facing the group of Chinese smartphone companies including this new giant vivo, how long can Apple, the great company that pioneered the mobile internet era, maintain its leading position in the market?