Vivo, one of the biggest smartphone makers in the world and now the second-largest phone vendor in the Philippines, never got to launch the APEX 2020 concept phone at this year’s Mobile World Congress tech show. MWC 2020 got cancelled due to fears over the spread of the coronavirus.

(Update, March 1: It’s finally official! Read Vivo APEX 2020: 3 futuristic features, hands-on intro.)

Recently, the company has announced on Weibo that the Vivo APEX 2020 is coming on February 28, complete with a few renders of the upcoming device. One image teases the phone’s “fullview edgeless display” and shows the number “120,” which might be a reference to the curvature of the screen or its refresh rate.

If you recall, last year’s Vivo flagship, the Vivo NEX 3, launched with a waterfall screen that curves sharply around the edges to almost a 90-degree angle. The APEX 2020 could extend the panel further on the sides. Our guess is that the number refers to the refresh rate, which wouldn’t be a huge surprise given the number of phones with a similarly fast display.

READ ALSO: Vivo NEX 3 long-term review: Next-gen flagship

Another ad confirms the presence of fast wireless charging, although there is no mention of the maximum wattage supported by the device. The Vivo APEX 2020 has also been confirmed to run on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chipset with an X55 modem for 5G, thanks to a recent post by the mobile chip maker.

Finally, there’s the camera. The APEX 2020 has been teased to feature a “gimbal-stabilizing” quad camera with a 48-megapixel sensor and “continuous optical zoom” capability.

SEE ALSO: Vivo surpasses Samsung as 2nd biggest phone brand in India

The latter is a little vague, but the inclusion of a periscope-style telephoto camera with up to 7.5x optical zoom should allow for an impressive zoom range. Perhaps the Vivo APEX 2020 can rival the 100x digital zoom of the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra? We’ll see. A gimbal-like camera system should result in less shaky video and better low-light shots.

Previous APEX prototypes never made it to the market, but the concept line has always provided us with a glimpse of what is to come. The original APEX debuted the first pop-up camera in a smartphone, and the APEX 2019 had virtual buttons, which the NEX 3 adopted.

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