14 DAY TRIAL // Nokia is the most recent name in the mobile industry that’s reportedly interested in building phones with fingerprint sensors integrated into the display.
According to reports coming from China, which should clearly be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism, Nokia 9, which is one of the two flagships prepared by the company and expected to launch this year, could come with such technology instead of a standard fingerprint reader on the back.
HMD Global, the new owner of Nokia, has been trying to capitalize on the popularity of the Finish brand as much as possible in the latest months, and the release of the legendary Nokia 3310 is one way to do this. Now HMD hopes that by investing in technology that’s not yet widely adopted could make Nokia a leader in the crowded Android ecosystem, though such an approach could always backfire should the fingerprint sensor embedded into the glass not work as expected.
Samsung and Apple failed to do it
The rest of the specs just make sense for a flagship phone launching in 2018 and include the Snapdragon 845 processor that’s also powering the US version of the Samsung Galaxy S9.
But when it comes to an in-display fingerprint reader, both Apple and Samsung failed to bring this feature to their devices after several tries to make it happen.
Apple, for instance, was expected to offer such a fingerprint sensor on the iPhone X, but the company’s leadership team wasn’t pleased with how the first prototypes worked and eventually decided to abandon it entirely, going instead for facial recognition.
Samsung has also tried to put an in-display fingerprint sensor on its devices, but the project has been pushed back several times. Most recently, it was revealed that the Galaxy Note 8 expected in the summer won’t feature such a tech because of the same reason: the technology doesn’t seem to be ready just yet.
The only company that’s offering a fingerprint reader integrated into the display is China-based Vivo, so it’ll be interesting to see if Nokia does manage to bring similar tech to the market when others failed to do it.