vivo has confirmed that three phones, the X500, X500 Pro and X500 Pro Max, arrive in September 2026 in China. Han Boxiao, a vivo product manager, announced the launch on Weibo in late August, then followed up days later with the camera specifications. There is no date within the month yet, nothing about other markets, and no price.
How vivo’s flagship line works
The X series is vivo’s camera line, developed with the German optics maker ZEISS, and it sits well above the V and Y phones most people buy. It normally arrives in two waves a year.
The X300 and X300 Pro landed in China on 13 October 2025, and the X300 Pro reached Kenya that December at KES 169,999. Five and a half months later, on 30 March 2026, came the X300 Ultra. Ultra is the tier where vivo puts the camera hardware it is proudest of, and the wait for it is the annual frustration of buying the Pro.
There was no X400. In Mandarin and Cantonese the word for four sounds like the word for death, so vivo skipped the number and went to X500.
The X500 range has three phones rather than two, and the Pro Max is the new one on top. It carries the X300 Ultra’s periscope camera, in September, instead of making you wait until spring.
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The periscope
The Pro Max uses a 200MP Samsung ISOCELL HP0 on a 1/1.4-inch sensor. A periscope camera bounces light sideways through a prism so a long lens fits inside a thin body, and the usual price is a cramped sensor starved of light. A 1/1.4-inch sensor is not cramped. It is larger than the main camera in plenty of midrange phones, and here it sits behind the zoom lens.
It starts at 85mm, the classic portrait focal length, and reaches 30x. It also accepts a 400mm teleconverter, a lens that clips onto the outside of the phone to extend its reach. vivo already sells that sort of accessory in Kenya, where a ZEISS 2.35x extender for the X300 Pro costs KES 40,000.
The smaller X500 Pro gets a 64MP Sony LYT-610, also starting at 85mm. Both lenses carry ZEISS APO certification, which is about controlling the coloured fringing that creeps around high-contrast edges at long zoom. Both are rated CIPA 7.0, the Japanese camera industry’s stabilisation standard, measured in stops. Seven stops is a lot of shake to cancel.
The Pro Max also gets a gimbal. Its main camera physically tilts through 3 degrees, twice the range of the X300 Ultra, and Han’s reasoning is the useful part: steadier optics let the shutter stay open longer, and a longer shutter is how you get a clean night shot instead of a smeared one. Reports say the compact X500 Pro does not include it.
Still unconfirmed
Everything else is leaks. The tipster Digital Chat Station describes a large centered circular camera island on both Pro models and rounder corners than last year, with the Pro Max at 6.85 inches, a compact 6.37 inches for the X500 Pro, and batteries past 7,000mAh. Spec listings add a 1260 x 2800 LTPO screen at 144Hz and 100W wired charging. The processor is a mess: 2nm by one account, 3nm by another, and a Geekbench entry showing a MediaTek MT6995 running Android 17.
vivo gave about three weeks’ notice last time. It announced the X300 launch on 22 September 2025 for a 13 October event, so the invitation should appear within days. Kenya waits longer. The X300 Pro landed in China in October 2025 and in Nairobi in December.
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