It has been a busy few weeks for new smartphone releases and much can actually be said for 2016 as a whole. Speaking of which today saw the latest of the new breed of smartphones arriving from Huawei. This was of course, the Huawei Mate 9, a device which had been the subject of a number of leaks and rumors in the build up to today’s launch event. Rumors aside though, the Mate 9 is now official and as a result, so are all the specs, features and selling points.
One of those features which has now been confirmed as included on the Huawei Mate 9 is FingerSense by Qeexo. Unless you follow smartphone tech news closely or happen to own a recent Huawei smartphone (like the Huawei P8 or Honor 7), then you might be unaware of what FingerSense actually is and more importantly, what it does. If that is the case and you are considering picking up the Mate 9, then you will want to get to grips with the feature as it is a rather interesting one.
Over the past few months, a lot has been made over the use of Touch ID-like technology where a user can place different amounts of pressure to the display of a smartphone to activate different features. The latest Pixel phones do come with a similar feature which is known as ‘App Shortcuts’ where you can press and hold select Google apps firmly and have the app show up a number of doable commands. Well FingerSense takes this idea a little further as instead of applying different amounts of pressure to the display to activate different features, FingerSense-enabled smartphones are able to understand the type of contact being made with the screen. To be clear, not the pressure being exerted but the actual contact being made. Therefore, tapping on the screen can cause one action, knocking the screen can cause another, a thumb-press a third, a nail a fourth, and you get the idea.
On the one hand this provides very clear and obvious benefits as Huawei has been able to include unique features onto their devices like knocking twice on the screen to take a screenshot. However, there are more wide-ranging benefits to this technology as it could in theory, tell the difference between a finger and a stylus and therefore, act accordingly depending on which is making contact with the screen. While the Mate 9 does not pack a stylus, the FingerSense technology is certainly included, so for those who do pick a Mate 9 up in the near-future, you may want to play around a little with the FingerSense features.