A recently unveiled concept phone from Chinese company Vivo got us all excited that we’re finally getting phones with a fingerprint scanner built into the screen. Unfortunately, Samsung probably isn’t jumping on that bandwagon just yet.
This is according to a new report by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has backtracked on his earlier position and is now claiming Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Note 9 smartphone probably won’t have an under-the-display fingerprint scanner.
“We now believe Samsung will cancel this feature on Note 9 because both ultrasonic (provided by Qualcomm) and optical (provided by Samsung LSI, Goodix, Egis, and Synaptics) solutions cannot meet Samsung’s technical requirements,” Kuo wrote in a new note that was relayed to MacRumors.
We came to a similar conclusion in our short time with Vivo’s concept, which enables fingerprint scanning on the entire lower portion of the screen. The feature worked, but was quite unreliable, and it typically required multiple finger scans for the phone to unlock.
Despite the technical issues hampering under-the-display fingerprint scanners, Kuo is still bullish on the technology, at least in the long term. He claims that it is “key for full-screen designs” and that facial recognition — as seen in the iPhone X — cannot fully replace fingerprint scanning.
Rumors that both Samsung and Apple plan to introduce this type of fingerprint scanner in one of their flagship phones have been around for years, but none of them have come to fruition. The only phone maker that has actually brought a smartphone with an under-the-display fingerprint scanner to market is Vivo, but its X20 Plus is currently only available in China.