Author: Zhou Yuan / Wall Street See

Challenger vivo, this time, has aimed the gun at apple.

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

This is the first time in vivo's history to directly challenge the flagship apple. So, where does vivo's confidence come from to dare challenge apple head-on?

The confidence lies in the "superpowerful" core product strength created by the upgraded Bla technology, including Thanos-level image performance, the evolution to a "personal AI asia vets entity" Blue Heart Xiaoyun, combining communication, battery, screen, and AI algorithm, bringing a brand-new experience in multiple dimensions of new technology performance, making the flagship model vivo X200 Pro in the vivo X200 series a strong challenger to the iPhone 16 series.

Wall Street News exclusively learned from the supply chain that guided by vivo's own "user-oriented innovative" research and development concept, the vivo X100 series practices integrated software and hardware technology and product strategy. After the combination of the two, the vivo X100 series achieved explosive sales, becoming the most successful model in the vivo X series sales, entering the top three in domestic high-end flagship sales.

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

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

All these prove that vivo has always adhered to user-oriented innovation, prioritizing user needs and experience in its research and development strategy, and has been highly validated by the market.

What aspects have been upgraded in the imaging experience?

Undoubtedly, the model that best represents the technical capabilities of the vivo X200 series is the top-of-the-line model of this series - the vivo X200 Pro.

This brand-new high-end flagship model is also the first flagship model from a domestic manufacturer in the second half of this year, making it the first domestic flagship model to compete head-to-head with the iPhone 16 series, which was just launched and went on sale on September 20.

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

Imaging capability has always been a fundamental strength of the vivo X series and the killer feature that establishes the market position of this series. To be honest, in terms of imaging experience, it's hard to imagine how vivo could surpass the foundation set by the vivo X100 Ultra.

From the presentation of the imaging part of the vivo X200 Pro at the launch event, it can be seen that this model not only maintains its strong imaging performance but also focuses on portrait photography across the entire focal range for breakthroughs.

This can also be understood, the telephoto performance of vivo X100 Pro has reached its peak, making it difficult to have a major performance breakthrough. Although it's not easy to go from 85 points to 99 points, it's actually even harder to go from 99 points to 100 points.

vivo X200 Pro is equipped with the Zeiss 0.2 billion APO super telephoto lens, jointly defined blueprints by Sony LYT-818, along with outstanding flagship image configurations such as the blueprints imaging chip V3+ and vivo's self-developed algorithm matrix, bringing a new iteration of Ultra-level image experience.

Among them, the APO super telephoto lens is a "familiar face" in the vivo X series, previously configured on vivo X100 Pro and vivo X100 Ultra; the former with 50 million pixels, the latter with 0.2 billion.

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

While maintaining the excellent experience of capturing the sun directly without glare on vivo X100 Pro and vivo X100 Ultra, vivo X200 Pro also achieves the long focal length perspective and image compression sensations of 135mm and 85mm focal lengths, realizing a full focal length for portrait photography, offering a richer variety of portrait photography options.

Different from the focus on landscape photography performance of vivo X100 Pro—such as capturing the sun directly, it is evident that vivo X200 Pro has enhanced portrait photography and video performance, such as full focal length portrait motion capture and brand new video super partitioning.

For this purpose, vivo has newly developed a dual streaming motion algorithm: ensuring clear and lossless image quality while increasing the shutter speed by 4-6 stops, providing users with better zero delay, focus locking, and motion blur effects.

Wall Street Journal noted that the main camera sensor used in vivo X200 Pro is the Sony LYT-818 imaging sensor, with a photosensitive area size of 1/1.28 inches, which is Sony's first image sensor equipped with a new high dynamic range (HDR) function just released on September 25.

With the support of Ultra High Conversion Gain (UHCG) and HDR functions, LYT-818 can achieve low-noise imaging 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, and can handle complex lighting environments through intelligent fusion of multiple gains, bringing more vivid and realistic imaging effects.

LYT-818's UHCG technology can reduce random noise (RN) to an unprecedented level of 0.95e-; and the HDR technology, due to the precise design of three gain settings, can accurately capture image information in a single exposure, significantly reducing dynamic artifacts such as ghosting through intelligent synthesis technology, making photos and videos of moving scenes smoother and clearer.

This is the most amazing technological feature of LYT-818, which can bring an image experience that is no less than IMX989. The reason why vivo X200 Pro, despite having a main camera sensor size smaller than IMX989, can still achieve an advancement in imaging capabilities (static photos and dynamic videos) is because it is equipped with this brand new sensor jointly defined by vivo and Sony, which provides impressive imaging capabilities.

Lanxin Little V has evolved into an AI smart body.

Starting from the vivo X100 series, vivo's flagship product launches have shifted the focus from the phone as the protagonist to vivo's technological brand - Lanke Technology (consisting of Blue Crystal Chip Technology Stack, Blueprint Imaging, Blue Ocean Endurance System, Lanxin Big Model, and Lanhe Operating System).

What are the technological iterations of this vivo Blue Technology?

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

MediaTek's official definition of the Tianji 9400 is 'Flagship 5G Smart Body AI Chip'. Therefore, the AI capabilities of vivo X200 Pro, equipped with Tianji 9400, have also been upgraded to a personal AI smart body, and in the form of 'Lanxin Little V', achieve a new interaction based on user intent understanding through the built-in vivo self-developed Lanxin Big Model of OriginOS 5.

Key technical highlights of the Dimensity 9400: Upgrading traditional AI applications to a better AI experience—integrating the MediaTek Dimensity Agentic AI Engine, the Dimensity 9400 can upgrade traditional AI applications to more advanced AI applications.

For example, using the 6 hours of user sleep time 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 smart body.

Therefore, vivo and MediaTek jointly define the ability of SoC chips, laying a solid foundation for enhancing the performance of vivo X series flagships including AI.

As the personal exclusive assistant for vivo X200 Pro users, the personal AI body, Xiaov, also synchronously upgrades generative AI applications such as text, image search, encyclopedia-style Q&A, writing generation, image generation, and app interaction.

Among them, image search is upgraded to "global invocation, precise selection": based on the selected content, Xiaov actively pushes related services, including encyclopedia introduction, schedule creation, translation, collection, document generation, and article summary.

From the experience upgrade of Xiaov in vivo X200 Pro, the Blue Technology has achieved extremely important technological and experiential iterations: the underlying core guiding ideology has evolved into—technology is no longer cold technology, but a true partner serving people.

For example, the X200 series of vivo debuted a kilometer-level off-network communication function, which not only solves the communication needs in the absence of a network environment, but also provides strong support for wilderness scientific research expeditions, disaster relief, etc.; at the same time, the X200 series introduced features such as "vivo sees" for barrier-free functions, effectively turning the vivo X200 series into the "eyes" of the visually impaired population, truly addressing the inconvenience in the lives of people with disabilities.

vivo once summarized its R&D concept as "around user-oriented needs, focus on technological innovation, and form an innovative R&D supported by industrial thinking", that is, "user-oriented innovation".

The key starting point for this innovative mindset is what value the product can create for users, rather than the engineering breakthroughs it has made.

Do these research and development principles really work?

This can be observed by the market performance of the vivo X100 series. After all, the vivo X100 series also implements this set of research and development principles.

Wall Street Journal exclusively learned from the supply chain that the vivo X100 series, from its launch to October 11th, has had explosive sales, becoming the most successful model in the vivo X series and successfully entering the top three in domestic flagship sales.

If we combine the market performance of the vivo X100 series with Vivo winning the top spot in the Chinese mobile phone market for three consecutive years (in the first, second, and third quarters of this year, Vivo successively won the sales crown in the Chinese market), Vivo has successfully achieved breakthroughs in the high-end market and overall market.

From this perspective, Vivo is accelerating its growth into a new tech giant. How long can Apple, a great company of the mobile internet era that includes the new giant Vivo, maintain its leading position in the market?