Another Chinese iPhone Clone Claims To Be The Thinnest Smartphone In The World - And It Looks Gorgeous

Until now, Chinese startup Oppo's R5 claimed the title of thinnest smartphone in the world.

Now, rival China-based smartphone maker Vivo has unveiled a device called the X5Max that's even slimmer than the razor thin Oppo R5 (via Engadget).

Vivo's new smartphone measures 4.75mm thin, while the Oppo R5 is 4.85mm thin. The iPhone 6 is 6.9mm thin.

The two phones look an awful lot alike, and they both bear some resemblance to the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5s in terms of design.

The back of Vivo's new phone, for example, consists of silver brushed aluminum with two glossy white plastic strips at the top and bottom. Unlike the iPhone and Oppo R5, Vivo's new phone has speaker grills showing on the lower plastic strip.

In fact, Vivo has placed a pretty big emphasis on audio with its X5Max.

The phone comes with dedicated audio processing chips from Sabre and Yamaha, and the latter of which powers the phone's karaoke mode. Essentially, this lets you hear yourself and the music you're listening to when you're using headphones.

The new Vivo phone features a 5.5-inch screen like the iPhone 6 Plus, with a 1080p resolution. There's a 5-megapixel camera on the front and a 13-megapixel camera on the back, which slightly bulges out from the phone's super thin frame.

Regardless, the phone's incredibly thin design, large HD screen, and polished metal frame make it look attractive enough to overlook that flaw.

Based on Engadget's report, it seems like the Viv X5Max has two key advantages over the Oppo R5: it feels light, and Vivo managed to squeeze in a standard headphone jack. The Oppo R5 feels a little heavy for such a thin device, and you need to plug headphones in through the microUSB port since it doesn't have a headphone jack.

The X5Max is launching in China on Dec. 12 for the equivalent of about $490, but there's no indication that it will come to the United States. Oppo's phone will come to the US eventually, but we haven't heard any announcements about that yet.

Check out Engadget's hands-on with the Vivo X5Max to get a better idea of what the phone looks like in person.