Vivo NEX 3S 5G Upgrades Are Mostly Invisible

The Vivo NEX S helped put the Chinese manufacturer on the global map thanks to the market's first pop-up camera. That was almost two years ago and, since then, a lot more of its kind have popped up and then faded from the scene. It doesn't seem like Vivo is willing to let go of that legacy just yet. Proof of that is the newly announced Vivo NEX 3S 5G which will give you a sense of deja vu until you look at its specs sheet.

It wasn't too long ago when Vivo launched the NEX 3, which came in both 4G and 5G flavors. It continued the heritage of the NEX pop-up camera and added a waterfall screen and one of the remaining few circular camera bumps. In terms of outward appearances, the NEX 3S 5G is an identical match as the changes are deep inside and, even then, not that many.

What has changed is the chipset, now a Snapdragon 865 that comes with 5G as part of the package. Both kinds of memory have been upgraded, too, using LPDDR5 for RAM and UFS 3.1 for storage. All in all, the Vivo NEX 3S 5G is being advertised for improved speed and performance, but only if you don't have a Vivo NEX 3 5G anyway.

That's because everything else is exactly the same between the two, from the 6.89-inch waterfall screen to the 4,500 mAh battery down to the triple cameras. The latter is still composed of a 64 megapixel main shooter, a 13 megapixel telephoto, and a 13 megapixel ultrawide camera. And, of course, the popup camera with its own flash is still there and still with a 16 megapixel sensor.

The one minor external change is that the Vivo NEX 3S 5G now has a third color option in orange. The good news is that, despite the spec bump, the phone launches with a slightly lower SRP starting at 4,998 RMB ($720) for 8 GB of RAM and 5,298 RMB ($760) with 12 GB, both coming with 256 GB of storage as standard.