Mystery solved: Vivo adopts Synaptics new tech

Dec 15, 2017 08:31 GMT  ·  By

Synaptics has recently announced technology to bake fingerprint sensors right into the display of a smartphone, and not beneath it as companies like Apple and Samsung were believed to be interested in.

At the time of the announcement, Synaptics was pretty vague on who is going to use its new optical fingerprint sensors, saying instead that one of the world’s top five smartphone manufacturers would soon launch such a device.

Everyone thought this is going to be Samsung, since the Galaxy S9 is on its way, but now the mystery is solved. Chinese smartphone maker Vivo, who is the fifth vendor right now, is ready to take the wraps off such a device that uses Synaptics tech to provide a fingerprint sensor baked into the screen.

Samsung interested in such tech too

Analyst Patrick Moorhead says having the fingerprint scanned on Vivo’s smartphone is “fast and simple,” despite the reader integrated into the display. Synaptics claims the sensor can be twice as fast as the iPhone X Face ID, but that’s pretty difficult to notice in real life.

On the other hand, Moorhead, who notes that the CMOS image sensor is just 0.7mm thick “and reads the fingerprint through the OLED display” is faster than he expected.

This isn’t the first time when the Chinese phone maker plans to unveil a device featuring a fingerprint sensor embedded into the screen. Earlier this year, just when Apple was said to be working on similar tech, Vivo presented a prototype featuring such a fingerprint sensor developed by Qualcomm, but the company is believed to have given up on it because its poor performance.

With this new technology ready for prime time, it’ll be interesting to see if some other top 5 manufacturers embrace it as well, as Samsung itself is said to be looking into such a sensor. Apple, on the other hand, has been rumored to be interested in removing fingerprint sensors from all iPhones with the 2018 lineup, going instead all-in on facial recognition.