Vivo X5 Max dethrones Oppo's R5 to become the world's thinnest smartphone

It looks like the latest obsession of Chinese smartphone vendors is to build the thinnest handsets ever made.

In September, the 5.1mm-thin Gionee Elife S5.1 was recognized by the Guiness World Records as the slimmest smartphone on earth. One month after - last week - Oppo introduced the R5, which, at 4.85 mm, became the newest king of ultra-thin smartphones. And now, if you can believe it, another Chinese company is getting ready to launch a handset that’s even thinner.

The company we’re talking about is Vivo (notably known for being the world’s first to introduce a handset with a Quad HD display), while the new smartphone is called X5 Max. The X5 Max is only 4.75 mm thin, and looks a lot like the Vivo X5, a slightly older handset that’s pretty slim itself (6.3mm). The new smartphone’s full dimensions are 153.9 x 78 x 4.75 mm.

Most likely, the X5 Max is the Vivo handset that we told you about last week, when rumors had it that it would be only 3.8mm thin (we’re not sure that’s even possible). The smartphone runs Android 4.4.4 KitKat, featuring a 5.5-inch display with 1080 x 1920 pixels, LTE, 13 MP rear camera, 5 MP front-facing camera, 2 GB of RAM, and an octa-core 1.7 GHz processor (probably made by MediaTek).

At the moment, we don’t know when the Vivo X5 Max will be released, and neither for what price. In any case, the handset will be launched in China first, where it's been approved by the Telecommunications Equipment Certification Center (also known as TENAA).