Vivo Will Launch The First Smartphone With An In-Display Fingerprint Sensor
Turns out, Vivo is one of the top five OEMs Synaptics was talking about. A couple of days ago, Synaptics announced that it had started the mass manufacturing of its in-display fingerprint sensor with “one of the top five OEMs.” While many speculated that the timing is ideal for the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+, it has been confirmed that Vivo will be the first smartphone maker to launch a phone with an in-display fingerprint sensor.
Here are some pics @anshelsag and I took of the Vivo smartphone with the Synaptics in-display fingerprint reader. The CMOS image sensor is .7mm thick and reads the fingerprint right through the OLED display. The experience was faster than I expected. pic.twitter.com/u1NFpXtFQM
— Patrick Moorhead (@PatrickMoorhead) December 14, 2017
Analyst Patrick Moorhead detailed his experience with a pre-production Vivo phone equipped with the in-display fingerprint sensor technology. Moorhead describes the sensor as “fast and simple,” and Synaptics has claimed that it is twice as fast as 3D facial recognition like Apple’s Face ID. That might be a hard comparison to make since both the technologies use different mechanisms.
Vivo has come off as a surprise and it will be a considerable blow for Qualcomm which has also been working on a similar technology for a long time. In fact, Qualcomm and Vivo showed off a Qualcomm-powered fingerprint-sensing display prototype earlier this year, but it was said to be noticeably slow since it was not a finished product.
