The Future of Smartphones is Here – The Amazing In-screen Fingerprint Sensor

Smartphone design hasn't changed that much over the past few years.  Bezels have got a little bit thinner display technologies gotten better. But we haven't seen that giant leap forward that we've seen in previous years. That is until now and it's due to the clear ID sensor from Synaptics and it might not mean much to you what the technology does is something we've been dreaming about for years and then rumored about for even longer. 

It puts a fingerprint reader under your display and I've got it here and I've got it working. So it's working on a five phone some version of this is eventually going to hit the market probably not in the US. But the technology here is absolutely incredible. Alright, so first just as English as a geek, it's incredible to actually see this working on a prototype that surprisingly let me set up and try and it worked as advertised. So the unlock time is like 0.7 ish seconds, it's about 40% slower than what you see with just normal fingerprint readers. 

But to the end-user I don't know as much of a slowdown at all. So, anything on this magic essentially works so the sensor is sitting below this point if you catch it in the right light you can actually see it down towards the bottom, it's set at an angle that they told me was for improved accuracy and speed. It's barely there, but it's kind of cool to see it. 

And because it's under the screen you can do a lot with design. You'd have to worry about taking up a chunk of space with a fingerprint reader on the front. On the back of devices if you make things look more elegant materials put in bigger battery put some generally other components because you don't have to worry about trying to find a spot for that sensor. 

Because there's an actual spot for it software kind of comes into place as the phone moves or you pick it up, it's a text you want to unlock it, it's going to illuminate essentially where you should put your finger put your finger right there and it unlocks. And the rest of how it works seems kind of pedestrian which I think is the point. It works the way all your finger parameters working out set up was very simple. 

Unlocking it is very simple. But it looks like magic when you turn your phone off and the screen is blank and you know as a fingerprint reader actually under there. So it's a simple answer of how this works, it's actually going through the pixels the OLED panel so it's optical. 

It's different to what we're going to see from Qualcomm later on in the year, it's an abuse of ultrasonic technology to do similar things. But this is here and right now. I could get a lot more about the technology, but as a fan of smartphones and what they represent this is a gigantic leap forward. 

This is the stuff of science fiction a few years later in the palm of my hand. Hopefully we'll see this technology make it a ton and more smartphones in 2018.  

So do you guys think reach excited as I am? Do you prefer some sort of other biometrics to unlock your phone? This is an incredibly elegant solution. Leave a comment down below to let me know. And of course don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter to get more updates from us till next time.