There’s a new title-holder in the world’s slimmest smartphone race – and it’s just 4.75mm thick

Just when you wondered how much slimmer smartphones could get, Chinese brand Vivo has set a new record with the X5Max at just 4.75mm thick, beating the 5mm thin iPhone 6 clone Gionee Slim 5.5. Astonishingly, it has achieved this while still managing – just – to fit in a standard 3.5mm headphone socket. It does, though, the now-standard cheat of allowing the camera to protrude by 2mm.

It’s also no slouch in the specs department, with a 64-bit octacore Snapdragon 615 processor, 5.5-inch 1080p display, 13MP main camera, 5MP front camera, 2GB RAM and 16GB internal storage – with a clever dual-SIM tray that allows you to substitute a microSD card of up to 128GB for one of the SIMs … 

For music lovers, it has some impressive dedicated audio chips: Yamaha YSS-205X signal processor, Sabre ES9018K2M DAC, Sabre ES9601 headphone amplifier and OPA1612 amplifier. Engadget reports that it also has a karaoke mode “in which you can sing along with songs and music videos while also hearing yourself through headphones.” That’s a thing now, apparently.

The X5Max is China-only for now, but is expected to come to the US at some point next year.