Vivo and Synaptics showed off the first smartphone to sport an in-display fingerprint scanner at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and TrendForce has just released their projections for such technology and fingerprint scanners in general. For those of you who do not know, TrendForce is a company which analyzes tech industry, and its new report is both interesting, and also expected, as in-display fingerprint scanners are expected to replace regular, capacitive fingerprint scanner in the future, read on.
TrendForce says that fingerprint scanners aren’t going anywhere in 2018, as other biometric authentication methods are not there yet, and that was to be expected. Facial recognition technology is good, but fingerprint scanners are still more convenient, and it remains to be seen if that will change at some point. In any case, TrendForce says that in-display fingerprint scanner will leave a dent in the market this year, a considerable dent, as Samsung, LG, OPPO, Vivo, Xiaomi, and Huawei are all expected to utilize in-display fingerprint scanner this year. TrendForce says that companies will bring the global fingerprint scanner penetration rate all the way up to 60 percent, and if that info is at least somewhat accurate, it’s definitely an indication that fingerprint scanners aren’t going anywhere, at least not yet, as the penetration rate of fingerprint recognition technologies in 2017 was 55 percent. Some of you may already know that Synaptics introduced its ‘Clear ID’ in-display fingerprint scanner which works with OLED panels, that announcement came last year, and ‘Clear ID’ fingerprint scanners are already in mass production for world’s top smartphone manufacturers.
The Vivo-branded handset which was shown off at CES 2018 sports Synaptics’ in-display fingerprint scanner, and even though we still don’t have any info regarding the phone’s specs, nor do we have its name, that is the first phone that sports such tech, and Vivo said that it will officially announce that smartphone, along with its availability info, in the near future. It’s also worth noting that Qualcomm is scheduled to release a competing sensor to Clear ID later this year, so you can definitely expect to see such tech in a ton of smartphones in the near future.