Meizu beats Vivo to the 'Zero' button phone

Over the past few weeks, Vivo has been in the news as they are preparing to launch the APEX 2019, a smartphone without any physical buttons, ports or even a speaker grille. From the looks of it, Meizu has just swooped in and stole a significant portion of Vivo’s thunder as they have announced a handset called the Meizu Zero that comes without any physical buttons, no speaker or even a charging port for conventional wired charging.

The Meizu Zero makes use of capacitive panels on the sides as a substitute for physical buttons for the power and volume rockers. This is a similar design what HTC used in their U12+; but HTC had protruding buttons on their handset. In place of a conventional speaker, the Meizu Zero utilises a piezoelectric transducer under the display, something similar with what Sharp and Xiaomi have done in the past with their Aquos Crystal and Mi Mix.

Since the Meizu Zero foregoes the traditional USB charging port, it makes use of a wireless charging facility. The handset features a Meizu-developed 18W charging and in the process making it the world’s fastest wireless charging handset. Data transfers are carried out only via Wi-Fi and cellular data. The Meizu Zero also doesn’t have a SIM slot and it uses an e-SIM feature that’s found on Apple devices like the new generation iPhones and Apple Watches.

The Meizu Zero features a 5.99-inch AMOLED display and not surprisingly it comes with an in-display fingerprint scanner. The face of the handset also comes with a 20MP camera. On the rear, there’s a 12MP + 20MP dual-camera setup that features Sony’s IMX 380 and IMX 350 AI-enabled sensors. The Zero comes with a Snapdragon 845 chipset and as of now, no word on RAM and onboard storage have been detailed. Lastly, the Meizu Zero will come in two colour options — Black and White.

The year 2019 appears to feature an innovation where button-less, port-less and speaker-less phones will be all the rage. After the Meizu Zero, Vivo is the next smartphone manufacturer to come out with a similar handset but with further shrunken bezels.