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Form factor is always important when it comes to pieces of technology intended for everyday use. The size of your TV greatly affects your home theater experience, and some PC components fit together better than others. Even though the thinness of a smartphone ultimately isn’t as important to the average consumer, it remains a bit of a status symbol in the high-end market, with the biggest smartphone makers all competing to make the thinnest panel phone.
At just 5.8 millimeters thick, Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge was a technological marvel, but phones released later, like the Apple iPhone Air, are even thinner. Although these globally dominant companies are going all out to make the thinnest phones physically possible, they may have already lost the battle a decade before it even started, because a 2014 Vivo phone completely beat them again.
The Vivo X5 Max seems like an impossibility. The phone is just 4.8 millimeters thick, almost a millimeter thinner than an iPhone Air. Despite this, the X5 Max retains not only a headphone jack, but also a SIM tray and a microSD slot, both virtually unheard of in current thin phones. The phone certainly won’t rival the cheapest smartphones released today in terms of performance or practical utility, but it still gives us a good look at how an ultra-thin smartphone can perform – and how, contrary to what Apple may want you to believe, a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack isn’t an impossibility when thinness is a priority.
Will we ever see another phone as thin as the Vivo X5 Max?
The Vivo X5 Max was released in 2014, which means it is over ten years old. Technology has evolved rapidly over time and has become much more space-optimized than it was before. Yet even with all these optimizations and the eagerness of companies like Apple and Samsung to appeal to a premium audience that values thinness, none of the ultra-thin phone makers’ attempts come close to the X5 Max.
The reason for this is quite simple: the X5 Max just isn’t a very good phone. With current technology, most of the experience it provides could be replicated with relative ease – it’s just not something most companies would want to make. There would be virtually no room for a battery, even if a manufacturer opted for a silicon-carbon battery – a battery technology that Apple and Samsung are not yet using. The phone would also be much slower than modern flagships; certainly usable, but not exactly what fans of high-end ultra-thin phones are looking for.
The camera is perhaps the biggest and most obvious reason why modern phones can’t be this thin anymore. The camera on this decade-old Vivo phone is pretty terrible by modern standards, and it was dull even for its time. The quality of a phone’s camera depends largely on the physical size of the sensor and the distance between it and the lens. Unlike components like the processor, you cannot diminish any of these physical elements while maintaining full optical quality. This is why modern smartphones have bigger camera bumps and why there probably won’t be a premium ultrathin phone that’s truly thinner than the old Vivo X5 Max.
