Newsletter
Samsung’s flagship lineup has been long rumored to sport an in-display fingerprint sensor, but no Galaxy device has included one till date. Even the upcoming Galaxy Note 9 will reportedly feature a regular fingerprint scanner on its back, placed below the camera housing. Things are rumored to change starting next year when the company’s top-end smartphones will ditch the rear-placed biometric scanners in favor of in-display ones. Besides the Galaxy S10 and Note 10, the 2019 Galaxy A series will also come equipped with the new fingerprint scanning tech, a report from China claims. The mid-range smartphone series will reportedly utilize the same ultrasonic fingerprint scanner from Qualcomm as the more premium Samsung devices of 2019.
The South Korean company is said to ship over 60 million smartphones with this new biometric scanning solution. In 2019, the Galaxy S10 series is rumored to go official with three models with varying screen sizes – 5.8, 6.1, and 6.4 inches – with only the larger two featuring the ultrasonic fingerprint scanner. In May, a report surfaced making similar claims about the Galaxy S10 including an ultrasonic biometric scanner supplied by Qualcomm besides a lot of firsts for the top-end smartphone series. Qualcomm has been working on this fingerprint solution called SenseID for several years now and was said to be commercially available along with Snapdragon 820 chipset, but it didn’t see the light of day ever since perhaps due to being under development. Its next generation was announced in June 2017 with the chip maker working closely with several smartphone makers, including Samsung, to bring its new fingerprint scanner to the mass market. The improved ultrasonic fingerprint scanner can be placed under both glass and aluminium since it uses ultrasonic sound waves to create a 3D image of the fingerprint, making it more secure than conventional solutions.
Being positioned in the premium mid-range category, the Galaxy A series is usually the first smartphone lineup from the company to get the features introduced with flagships, for example, Infinity Display. In many cases, the mid-range series receives significant improvements prior to the Galaxy flagships, like this year’s Galaxy A8 Plus featured a repositioned fingerprint scanner and a vertical dual-camera arrangement, which was later incorporated into the Galaxy S9 Plus. Given such instances, it wouldn’t be surprising if the 2019 Galaxy A lineup comes equipped with an in-display fingerprint scanner before the S10 does.