Vivo launching new selfie-centric smartphone in India next month; is it the X9s series?

Vivo is one of the few successful smartphone companies that have made it big in India. The Chinese tech giant is popularizing its phone series by focusing on the camera and music aspects, which it finds to be the key USPs in a phone. The latest V5 series was well-received by consumers and critics alike, and it's time for an upgrade.

Vivo has sent out a cryptic invite to us, hinting at a new smartphone launch happening in September. Details of the new phone haven't been shared by the company, considering it's an early teaser, but we expect to hear more in the coming days.

The invite reads, "See you on September," which is not grammatically correct, but it appears the error is on purpose. There is a silhouette of the mystery phone seen in the background in the shape of numerical seven, which makes the invite read "See you on 7 September."

If true, Vivo's new smartphone is less than a month away. The company hasn't teased anything on the social media channels, where Vivo is quite active. The promotions are likely to begin soon.

By looking at the phone's silhouette on the invite, we can see slim bezels, metallic body and a two-string antenna line towards the top. It is unclear if the antenna lines will take a straight line at the back or get curved around the edges as seen in the Vivo V5 Plus.

The front camera usually takes the top left spot above the display, which is not visible in the invite making it hard to guess if there will be a dual camera or a single lens. If we have to take a calculated guess on which smartphone it is then our money is on the X9s series, which was launched in China last month.

Vivo X9s and X9s Plus are premium smartphones with dual cameras on the front to attract selfie lovers. Both phones have a 20MP main sensor and a 5MP secondary sensor on the front and a 16MP camera with LED flash at the back. The phones come with 4GB RAM, 64GB storage, fingerprint mounted home button on the front and 4G VoLTE support.

As for the differences, the X9s sports a 5.5-inch Full HD AMOLED display, an octa-core Snapdragon 652 chipset and a 3,320mAh battery. The X9s Plus comes with a 5.85-inch Full HD AMOLED display, Snapdragon 653 processor and a larger 4,105mAh battery.

Our guess could be wrong, but that's the only recent smartphone that was launched in China and not India. Stay tuned while we continue to dig into what's coming from Vivo next month.