Fingerprint readers are par for the course with today’s flagships, and even midrange handsets, as more and more mobile payment systems require an extra level of authentication to work just like your credit or debit card. Moreover, we are getting accustomed to use them for unlocking our phones, securely launching apps, and so on. Some sensor areas even offer extra functionality, like back navigation, or swiping through the interface.
The ubiquity of fingerprint scanners today comes with a price, though. Manufacturers are usually embedding the reader in the home keys beneath the display, which calls for an obligatory physical clicker there, and makes creating phones with excellent screen-to-body ratio more problematic. Granted, the new Galaxy Note5 and S6 edge+ have a fingerprint reader built into the physical home key, and still boast the best screen-to-body ratio for their display diagonal, but Apple, for instance, which uses a circular home key, seems destined to make phones that are quite large for their panel size because of that.
There are a few companies that do away with the finger-scanner-in-the-home-key paradigm, like Huawei, for example. It placed the reader of the Mate7 on its back, for instance, achieving excellent screen-to-body-ratio on the huge phablet. That is still not an ideal solution, though, as you can’t unlock the phone or authorize payments with it when lying face-up on the desk, for example. That is why Huawei introduced a unique fingerprint scanner placement with the new Honor 7i, moving it on the left side, directly under your finger at all times. In fact, many of you prefer it this way, as our recent polling shows, and are likely to use the finger scanner more when it is positioned on the side.
This seemingly opened the floodgates for utilizing Fingerprint Cards’ thinnest FPC1145 finger scanning module in power/lock keys, as after the Honor 7i, we had a few more phones announced with these fingerprint sensing solutions, check them out below:
Huawei Honor 7i
Sony Xperia Z5 | Xperia Z5 Compact | Xperia Z5 Premium
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