Vivo Launches World’s First Phone with In-Display Fingerprint           

Vivo, in collaboration with Synaptics, announced a groundbreaking on-screen fingerprint scanner technology at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2018) that held in Las Vegas. Innovators and consumer electronics companies take to the CES stage yearly to showcase their new technologies to the teeming crowd of bloggers and market influencers. This year’s event was quite exceptional, with self-driving cars ferrying participants from place to place.

The on-screen (or in-screen) fingerprint scanner is a technology most people expected to see debut on either Samsung or Apple’s flagship devices last year (instead, we got an unreachable fingerprint sensor and FaceID). Turns out that they had to scrap the feature to catch up with launch dates and stuff. But in 2018, Vivo is taking the lead in innovation and has successfully implemented the technology on an unnamed Vivo flagship that will be announced later on in the year.

No doubt, if all things go well, we’d see most 2018 flagships spotting this shiny new feature (maybe on the Galaxy S9, iPhone 11, Pixel 3 or OnePlus 6).

The on-screen fingerprint scanner is optical-based. When you place your finger on the fingerprint icon at the bottom of the phone’s 6” display, the phone’s OLED display panel emits light to illuminate your fingerprint. Your fingerprint image is scanned and reflected into an in-display fingerprint sensor and authenticated. It works only on OLED screens since LCDs have a backlight which would make the process relatively impossible.

Most hands-on feedback noted that the on-screen fingerprint scanner was wee-bit slower than the traditional fingerprint scanners we have on other phones, probably by a few milliseconds. Vivo is probably hoping you don’t notice the difference (winks).

But how convenient is this new tech? Now we can lose all those bottom and size bezels and still have our fingerprint scanner at the most convenient spot. Way to go Vivo!