Time.news – A cover of the New Yorker released at the most critical moment of the pandemic portrayed a pretty girl with make-up and carefully dressed engaged in a virtual aperitif in front of the PC screen. From the waist down, however, a pair of gym shorts, unshaved legs and all around, out of camera reach, chaos. It was the situation in which that part of humanity that one was was suddenly found having to revolutionize their habits – free time or work whatever it was – and to mediate them through a screen, but above all through a lens.
Not everyone has been able to reinvent themselves. Teachers who blatantly got the shot wrong by doing an hour of class with the camera pointed at their shoulder, respectable employees who took on the appearance of a Mos Eisley Cellar because they didn’t know how far to stand from the lens … All optimistically convinced that this too would pass .
The pandemic, sooner or later, will pass. What will remain – now there is no doubt – are the video calls, video meetings, call of any shape and nature. And with them a new need will be consolidated: to look your best. And this is where a small – but decisive – revolution in the smartphone industry starts.
For some time the sector no longer seems capable of finding a creative inspiration and has focused on the development of the photographic sector triggering a competition between producers that ended up being an end in itself. Telephones worth over a thousand euros with hardware and software developed together with the great brands of photography and then post a photo in low resolution on Instagran. But, as often happens, it is the events that determine the success of a bet and the investments made in the photographic sector seem to find meaning in what is no longer a hedonistic mania (selfies) but a professional need (video calls).
It has been calculated that 90 million selfies are taken every day around the world, but no one has yet estimated how many hours we spend in front of a lens engaging in meetings with people we may never have met in real life and who judge us – inevitably – also by our clothes. Even worse: from a dress mediated by a lens and a screen. So it is not just what we wear or the hairstyle that weighs, but the shot we have chosen, the light that illuminates us, the definition of the sensor that is transforming us into an electronic signal.
The first to think seriously about need to make the front camera of a smartphone a working tool were the Chinese alive. A brand that has now been on the European market for a year and a half and struggles a bit to find a place among the competitors who have shared the guise of Huawei and with them that 30% of the market that the Shenzhen house occupied.
“The front camera has become one of the most important criteria in the choice of smartphones“says Ettore Patriarca marketing and retail director of vivo,” creating a product designed in line with market trends and the increasing use of the front camera was an inevitable step “
It is from this that the V23 was born, a mid-range smartphone (costs 550 euros) “designed not only for the so-called ‘creators’, who every day have to represent themselves but also to meet what is always the need more frequent to attend meetings and share videos “.
Vivo’s strategy for this product has two objectives: young audiences who make massive use of video calls and selfies and professional users. The price range captures both of them and candidates the V23 to enter the amenities that companies provide to employees. “It cannot be trivialized by defining it as a selfie-phone” says Patriarca, “The approach that the worker must have with the video call has changed and the decision was to continue to focus on the awareness of giving quality to communication. image it is about giving a technological support that serves to enhance ourselves in front of the interlocutors by helping us to focus on the contents. Today if we think of the photographic sector, the devices have a very high average. We wanted to focus on something that really adds a novelty compared to the competition and what people do every day. You have to give the user a new real motivation and not just a mere evolution of the previous model. A technology that is not an end in itself but for what it can serve “.
The strong point of the V23 is the dual tone spotlight: it is present on the front of the smartphone a system consisting of four LED lights support that can be activated and deactivated in manual or automatic mode according to the needs of light that requires the shot or the video and also allow the user to customize the atmosphere and brightness of the photo quickly.
Image quality and clarity of detail are entrusted to the custom 50 MP JNV sensor with ISOCELL 3.0, a technology that allows you to isolate pixels.
The front camera system also consists of a 105-degree super wide angle to take group selfies or capture more landscape in your selfies. The rear photographic sector is instead composed of a 64 MP main camera, an 8 MP super wide-angle camera and the 2 MP Super Macro.
But since it is a smartphone also designed for young people, an indulgence to aesthetics could not be missing: the photochromic glass shell reacts to UV light by changing from a warm to a cooler shade. A function, yes, totally an end in itself, especially considering that nobody uses a smartphone without a cover.
Definitely more useful and interesting management and safety equipmentsuch as iManager that allows you to manage consumption, clean the memory and have an antivirus developed with Avas and a privacy protection system that shows directly on the display if an app is activating audio and video without our knowledge.
Pushing it all is a MediaTek Dimensity 920 processor, a mid-to-high-end chip that does what it needs to without overdoing it. For a car that aims to lead a small revolution, you could think of something a little more performing.