Vivo has emerged the first company in the world to come up with a production ready smartphone that features an under-screen fingerprint reader. And the company is already enthralling the CES crowd with the phone, with users visibly impressed with the said feature.
The particular device however does not have an official name as yet though Vivo officials have confirmed the handset is destined to reach markets sometime soon. The company however isn’t committing to a specific launch schedule as yet. Pricing is another mystery at the moment though given that the technology has just started to debut in working prototypes, it is going to command a premium for a few years before it starts pilfering down the line to mid-range devices as well.
The new in-screen fingerprint sensor technology is also expected to be just as good, or maybe even better than the capacitive fingerprint scanning technology currently in use in most Android handsets. Synaptics, that perfected the tech is claiming it to be extremely responsive, with a reaction time of just 0.7 secs. That is impressive though still a tad slower than the 0.2 secs that the best capacitive scanners are capable of now.
The slight speed lag apart, there is another shortcoming with the Synaptics tech – its compatibility with only OLED panels at the moment. That’s because it essentially is an optical sensor which lights up the specific spot on the display when a finger is pressed against it.
There is usually a graphics effect which again is purely is a software derived thing to let users know the system has detected the presence of a finger press. Once an image of the finger press is obtained, it is then transferred to the built-in AI chip to match the same against the registered image of the authentic user. Symantec is also claiming the feature to be actually more robust than currently used system given that more than 300 parameters are taken care of to authenticate a user, which greatly reduces the possibility of a hack.
Also, while Vivo happens to be the first and only company at the moment to show off a working prototype featuring an under-screen fingerprint scanner, it remains to be seen what other companies offers the same tech. Symantec, in its press release announcing the launch of the technology has specific mention of it being suitable for ‘Infinity Displays’. That again being a term used by Samsung for the S8 design, its likely upcoming S9 too might feature the under-screen fingerprint scanning tech. That if true will no doubt make for an exciting proposition.