vivo's taken its X Fold6 foldable phone global. The Chinese phone maker announced the international launch on 30 September, three months after the phone went on sale back home. The selling point is a big battery in a very thin body: 6,900 mAh in a phone that's 4.4 mm thick when it's open.

The first confirmed price outside China is €2,199 in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Basic Tutorials reports. It went on sale there through vivo's online store on 1 October. vivo says other markets will get their own prices and dates, and it hasn't announced an Australian release.

What vivo announced for the X Fold6

vivo's global announcement went out from Shenzhen on 30 September. It calls the X Fold6 a phone "designed for professionals who are constantly on the move." Most of it's about getting work done on a phone that opens out into a small tablet.

Photo: メイド理世 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0), cropped

The phone first launched in China in late June. Chinese outlets, Sina Tech among them, reported that sales opened there on 1 July at a starting price of 7,999 yuan.

The international model comes in two finishes, Prism Black and Horizon Blue, and they're not quite the same size. vivo says the Prism Black one is about 4.4 mm thick unfolded and weighs 228 g. The Horizon Blue one is 4.8 mm and 235 g.

The battery is the headline

Foldables have usually made you pick. You could have a thin phone or a big battery, but rarely both. vivo's answer is chemistry. It says the X Fold6 uses fifth-generation silicon anode technology to pack in more energy, plus what it calls a third-generation semi-solid-state battery.

vivo claims the battery holds up in the cold, giving reliable power "even in extreme conditions down to −20°C." That's vivo's own claim, and we haven't seen anyone test it independently yet.

Charging tops out at 80 W with a cable and 40 W wirelessly, and you can charge other gadgets off the back of the phone. vivo's own notes say you'll need its own charger and cable to get the full 80 W, and a separate vivo wireless charger of at least 40 W for the wireless figure.

The X Fold6 lands in a busy few weeks for book-style foldables. The Xiaomi 18 Fold launched in China on 7 September, and Apple's foldable iPhone Duo opens for pre-orders on 16 October.

Screens, chip and cameras

Open it up and there's an 8.02-inch main screen. The cover screen on the outside is 6.51 inches. vivo says both are LTPO panels that run from 1 to 120 Hz, peak at up to 5,000 nits in small areas, and drop as low as 1 nit for reading in the dark. Gizmochina lists the inner screen at 2,504 by 2,312 pixels. vivo says the inner panel uses Samsung's M14 light-emitting material and the cover screen uses BOE's Q11, which it says makes them more efficient and tougher.

The chip is MediaTek's Dimensity 9500 Super Edition. vivo says it built it with MediaTek "exclusively for X Fold6." Gizmochina reports up to 16 GB of memory and up to 1 TB of storage, though what you can get varies by market.

As on vivo's recent flagships, the cameras are a joint effort with ZEISS. The main camera's 200 megapixels, on a large Samsung sensor that vivo says the two companies specified together. There's a 3x periscope telephoto on Sony's LYTIA 602 sensor, with up to 100x digital zoom, and Gizmochina lists a 50-megapixel ultrawide.

Basic Tutorials reports the phone also works with vivo's ZEISS Telephoto Extender Gen 2. That's a clip-on lens that stretches the telephoto out to a 200 mm equivalent, and Basic Tutorials says it's the same accessory vivo sells for its X300 Ultra.

For video, vivo lists 4K at 60 frames per second in Dolby Vision. There's a Stage Mode for concerts, and a teleprompter on the cover screen, so you can read a script while you film with the rear cameras.

The X Fold6 is rated IPX8 and IPX9 for water and IP5X for dust. Basic Tutorials calls that unusual for a foldable. vivo's footnotes say the IPX8 test means up to 30 minutes in 1.5 m of fresh water.

The software is built around multitasking

The phone runs OriginOS 7 Fold, which Gizmochina says is based on Android 17.

vivo's main multitasking feature is called Multi-Task Workbench. One mode keeps your main app in a big window with four smaller helper windows around it. Another lets you run up to four apps side by side and resize them however you like. You can drag stuff straight from one app into another, too.

There's a Desktop Mode for plugging into a monitor or TV, and an AI agent called Jovi. vivo says Jovi can carry out tasks across phones and PCs from a voice command, and can run scheduled and repeating jobs. Like most phone makers' AI claims, how well that works day to day is something reviews will show.

vivo lists a few more specific tools. AI Meeting Assistant records in-person meetings, labels who's talking and writes up a structured summary, and it can put live captions on video calls. AI File Manager sorts and names your files and sums up what's in them. AI Reader Mode reflows messy PDFs into an ebook-style layout, so they're easier to read on the big inner screen.

For travellers, vivo says a Data Store feature lets people in some markets buy local data plans on the phone itself, across 129 countries and regions, without swapping SIM cards.

Price and where you can buy the vivo X Fold6

According to Basic Tutorials, the €2,199 German price gets you the only configuration on offer there, with 12 GB of memory and 512 GB of storage. Spanish retailer MediaMarkt lists the phone in that same configuration. The same report says October buyers in Germany get extras, including another year of warranty and a vivo Watch GT 2.

Gizmochina notes vivo hasn't put out a full list of countries yet. The company says prices and availability will be announced market by market. We couldn't find an Australian launch announcement, so if you're here, it's import-only for now.

What vivo has shown is that a foldable doesn't have to give up battery life to stay thin. If its numbers hold up in testing, the X Fold6 sets a high bar for the next round of book-style foldables.