So I’ve been spending most of the week playing around with the Huawei Ascend Mate 7. It’s not often that we get devices from Huawei to review, so when we do get them, we do pretty big reviews on them. And a big device like the Ascend Mate 7 deserves a big review. However, that won’t be for a bit longer. This week, I wanted to talk about fingerprint sensors. We had one in the Motorola Atrix back in the day. More recently they were in the HTC One Max, Samsung Galaxy S5, Galaxy Tab S, and Galaxy Note 4. As well as the iPhone. Now I used the fingerprint sensor on the One Max and was not impressed. It was a swipe gesture, and right below the camera, which was not a good idea. And it didn’t work half the time. Now Samsung sort of went the Apple way. Putting the fingerprint reader in the home button, but again it was a swipe gesture and from my time with both the Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Tab S, it never worked perfectly. I haven’t used the Galaxy Note 4 yet, so I can’t comment on that.
But now back to the Ascend Mate 7. It has a fingerprint sensor on the back of the device just like the HTC One Max did. But there are two things that are different here. One, it’s set up to where you just touch the sensor and it’ll unlock your phone. Two, it actually works. Imagine that. I’ve had the fingerprint reader set as my default lock screen lock for the past 3 days and the only time it didn’t work was when I used the wrong finger – imagine that. Otherwise, it was perfect. So why can’t every other phone with a fingerprint sensor work this well? Either make it work, or don’t add it in there. I’m still not a big fan of fingerprint sensors, but the fact that it actually worked, and worked well was a big deal to me.
Right now, there’s not much else you can do with fingerprint sensors on Android, other than unlock your phone. But hopefully that begins to take off with mobile payments. It’d be much easier to use your fingerprint instead of a pin for your debit card purchase, right? For now, the one thing I want, is for fingerprint sensors to work. I shouldn’t have to keep swiping my finger multiple times to get the thing to unlock. And it shouldn’t take minutes to unlock my device. The Ascend Mate 7 literally takes about 1-2 seconds from the time you put your finger on the sensor and it unlocks.