Samsung is currently the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world. This Korea-based company has been fighting Apple out in the market for quite some time now, and the two companies sued each other a number of times thus far. Both the Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy devices sport a physical home button below the display, though the buttons on these devices are significantly different. iPhone smartphones sport round-shaped home buttons, while the buttons on the Galaxy-branded devices are a complete opposite of that, they’re oblong-shaped basically. This way, the two companies basically have their own styles and can rest easy as far as lawsuits go, but it seems like that might change soon, read on.
Two new Samsung patents surfaced, and the first one hints at a circular fingerprint scanner for some of the upcoming Samsung-branded devices. Judging by this patent, Samsung might actually include a round fingerprint scanner below the display in the future, but the question remains, will this be a physical home key, or just a capacitive button? Either way, this might push Apple to sue Samsung once again in the future, but considering this is just a patent listing, let’s wait and see what happens before we jump to conclusions. Now, the second patent is quite interesting actually, it hints at a new placement for the rear-facing fingerprint scanner. Pretty much every rear-facing fingerprint scanner is located in the middle of the phone’s rear side, right below rear-facing cameras (presuming they’re centered, and not on the side), well, it seems like Samsung intends to change the placement of such fingerprint scanners. Now, do keep in mind it is possible Samsung does not intend to place the fingerprint scanner so high in their smartphones, but is only patenting the technology for future use, and plans to include such scanner in the usual place, as we’ve seen on other devices which ship with rear-facing fingerprint scanners. Such high placement for a rear-facing fingerprint scanner really does not make sense unless we’re looking at a really small smartphone, but we’ll see what the company is planning once they include a rear-facing fingerprint scanning sensor in one of their smartphones.
That is more or less it, you can take a look at sketches for both of these patents in the gallery down below. At this point we can only wait and see how will Samsung use these news patent (and if they will use them at all), though it could take a while before that happens, of course.
