Tag Archives: Smartphones

The motorola signature 27 Signs Its Camera With Bang & Olufsen

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A smartphone’s camera bump usually exists to hold lenses and nothing else, a necessary bulge nobody asks to admire. The motorola signature 27 turns that same block into a badge, stamping a Bang & Olufsen wordmark directly onto the module beside the lenses themselves. It’s the clearest possible signal that this device treats audio as a design decision, not a spec buried three pages into a press release.

That badge marks Motorola’s first phone built under its new multi-year partnership with Bang & Olufsen, a deal aimed at making sound feel purposeful rather than incidental. Camera hardware and speaker hardware rarely share billing on the same panel of glass, yet here they sit side by side, treated as equally important reasons to pick this phone up and turn it over in your hand before ever opening an app.

Designer: Motorola, Bang & Olufsen

The name itself carries intent too. Motorola is retiring its old naming logic in favor of a simple year-based tag, with this device marking the first signature phone to carry a number tied directly to 2027 rather than an arbitrary sequential digit. It’s a small administrative choice that quietly promises a predictable rhythm going forward, one flagship a year, clearly dated, without guesswork about where it sits in the lineup.

Flip it back around, and the chassis keeps making that same argument through touch alone. The Coal Smoke colorway wears a tightly woven, tactical-feeling texture borrowed from automotive interiors and performance wear, grippy enough to trust in a bag without a case. Capulet Green swaps that for a brushed, fabric-like softness pulled from fashion and interior design instead, warmer under a thumb than any glass back manages.

Both finishes wrap around a body built specifically to survive its own performance. Powering everything is Qualcomm’s brand-new Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, paired with a cooling system Motorola calls ArcticMesh, combining diamond-infused gel, liquid metal, and copper mesh across a vapor chamber 40% larger than before. That matters most during long gaming sessions or video exports, when cheaper phones start throttling, and this one keeps its pace steady.

Photography gets the same layered treatment. A 50MP Sony sensor anchors the main shot, backed by a 200MP periscope lens for distant detail, while stabilization hardware works alongside Qualcomm’s own image processing to keep handheld footage from wobbling during a walk or a pan. Motorola’s Video Enhancement Engine reads a scene in real time, adjusting color before and during recording so a sunset or a dim concert stage looks the way it actually felt standing there.

Google’s Gemini threads through the software layer without waiting to be asked. It handles more than answering questions, moving from a spoken intention to a finished action, booking a table, drafting a plan, or turning a handful of photos into an edited video through a tool Motorola calls Gemini Omni. A companion feature named Lyria builds original music and soundtracks from scratch, folding creative software into hardware that already looks built for it.

None of this arrived as a finished retail package. What Motorola showed at Snapdragon Summit is a preview, missing pricing and a firm release window, with the company promising fuller detail as 2026 continues. What’s already clear is the intent: sound, texture, and image quality are being treated as one connected decision here, not three separate boxes checked down a spec sheet.

The post The motorola signature 27 Signs Its Camera With Bang & Olufsen first appeared on Yanko Design.

Vivo’s X500 Series Arrives With a Pro Max Built for Creators

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Vivo has unveiled the X500 series in Shanghai, introducing the X500, X500 Pro, and X500 Pro Max as the first phones built around its new dynamic imaging strategy. The whole lineup is meant to raise the bar for both photography and video, but the X500 Pro Max is clearly the main attraction. It is the model with the biggest imaging ambitions, the most serious video features, and Vivo’s clearest attempt yet to turn a smartphone into a genuine all-in-one production tool.

The X500 Pro Max debuts Vivo’s new Sony LYTIA L910 sensor, which the company says delivers true 17 EV ultra-high dynamic range output. The goal is to preserve more detail across bright highlights and deep shadows in the same frame. The rest of the setup is just as ambitious, pairing the main camera with a 200MP ZEISS APO telephoto camera and support for a 400mm equivalent Vivo ZEISS Telephoto Extender Gen 2 Ultra. Vivo is also putting plenty of weight behind stabilization, with 3-degree gimbal-grade OIS on the main camera and CIPA 7.0 professional stabilization on both the main and telephoto cameras.

Designer: Vivo

Vivo X500 Pro Max

Video is where the X500 Pro Max really starts to pull ahead. The phone supports 4K 240fps cinematic slow-motion video, 4K 120fps 10-bit Log burn-in direct output, AF tracking video, and 8K Native Live. Vivo is also leaning into a more professional workflow with 10-bit 4:2:2 encoding, ACES support, and official color transformation support with DaVinci. Taken together, those features make the X500 Pro Max feel less like a phone that happens to shoot good video and more like a camera tool built with editing in mind from the start.

Vivo X500 Pro

The X500 Pro Max and X500 Pro share almost the same design, with size being the main differentiator. Both come in black, gray, white, and dusty orange, with a subtle two-finish back panel that adds slight contrast to the rear surface. The effect is understated, but it helps the phones feel a little more considered than a purely spec-driven flagship.

The standard X500 looks a little different from its Pro siblings. Available in black, gray, white, and purple, it uses a square camera plateau at the top instead of following the same rear layout as the X500 Pro and X500 Pro Max.

Vivo X500

The rest of the hardware is built to keep pace with the camera system. The X500 Pro Max runs on the MediaTek Dimensity 9600 Pro and includes Vivo’s V3+ imaging chip alongside the VS1+ pro imaging chip. It also gets a 6.85-inch 2K ZEISS Master Color Display and an 8000mAh battery, which should matter to anyone actually using these video features for more than a few minutes at a time. The X500 Pro shares much of the same foundation, making the two Pro models feel more like parallel options than a simple good-better-best ladder.

Vivo is also building an ecosystem around the X500 Pro Max with a dedicated Creator Kit. Its most interesting feature is a real-time wireless camera viewfinder, which makes framing and monitoring a lot more flexible during shoots. The kit also includes 2.35x and 4.7x telephoto converter lenses, pushing the phone further toward a more modular shooting setup.

The standard X500 still sounds strong on its own, with a large main sensor, ZEISS gimbal-grade OIS, 4K 120fps slow motion, and 8K Native Live. Still, this launch revolves around the X500 Pro Max. It is the phone Vivo is using to show where mobile imaging is headed next, and it makes a stronger case than most for a phone that can go well beyond casual shooting and hold its own in professional-level workflows.

Vivo has confirmed pricing for the X500 series. The X500 starts at 5,499 CNY (about $821) for 12GB+256GB, the X500 Pro starts at 6,499 CNY (about $970) for the same tier, and the X500 Pro Max opens at 6,999 CNY (about $1,045) for 12GB+256GB. The Creator Kit, built around the 16GB+1TB satellite communication X500 Pro Max, carries a suggested price of 12,999 CNY (about $1,941). Pre-orders for the X500 series are open now in China, with official sales beginning on September 24. A global rollout is planned for later on, though the company hasn’t shared specific markets or pricing outside China, leaving international buyers to wait for further details.

The post Vivo’s X500 Series Arrives With a Pro Max Built for Creators first appeared on Yanko Design.