Vivo to unsettle iPhone 17 Pro and Galaxy S26 Ultra with DSLR-level tech on its next

Vivo’s product manager Han Boxiao took to Weibo this week to talk telephoto cameras, and what he described sounds less like a smartphone spec sheet and more like a pitch for a professional cinema rig.

The subject: the fifth-generation Zeiss 200-megapixel “Thanos” periscope telephoto lens coming to the Vivo X300 Ultra — and if even half of it holds up, the iPhone 17 Pro and Galaxy S26 Ultra have a real problem on their hands.

New zoom sensor with some serious resolution and stabilization muscle

The centerpiece is a new Samsung HPE sensor sitting behind Zeiss’ fifth-gen 200MP Thanos telephoto lens, with improvements across colour, focus, HDR, and power efficiency. But the thing that jumps out is the stabilization.

Regular telephoto OIS on most phones wobbles between 0.7° and 1°. The X200 Ultra’s 1.2° was already making competitors nervous. The X300 Ultra reportedly triples that, hitting 3° optical image stabilization — CIPA 7.0 territory, the kind of rating you’d expect on a dedicated professional camera, not something that fits in a jacket pocket.

Han Boxiao showed the lens physically moving in a demo video, and it’s the sort of thing that makes you do a double-take.

Faster autofocus for moving subjects

Then there’s autofocus. A new Blueprint high-refresh-rate AF engine pushes telephoto motion capture to 60fps — double what the rest of the industry manages at 30fps. Wildlife, sports, kids who won’t stay still — the X300 Ultra is apparently ready for all of it.

Zoom out to the full camera system and it gets more interesting. The X300 Ultra pairs this telephoto with a 200MP Sony LYT-901 primary sensor, making it the only phone currently expected to field two 200MP cameras simultaneously. Neither Apple nor Samsung are anywhere near that on paper.

A China launch is expected later this month, with a global rollout pencilled in for sometime in Q2 2026 — the first time Vivo’s Ultra series is heading to international markets at all.