Vivo’s new X20 Plus UD phablet is considered by many as the first ever smartphone in the world to sport an in-screen fingerprint sensor, and it will officially be launching in China, the phone maker’s native homeland, this coming January 24th. After the handset hits store shelves (at least in the Chinese mobile market) this week, other mobile brands are expected to also introduce their own take on the under-display fingerprint scanner concept.
Vivo had generated a lot of buzz during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) event held earlier this month in the city of Las Vegas in Nevada when it successfully demoed a fully functioning prototype of its in-screen fingerprint reading tech. At that time, the Chinese tech giant had not revealed the official product name of its smartphone, but those looking to become early adopters soon now know what to look for.
Now for the specs -- the Vivo X20 Plus UD features a 6.43 inch Super AMOLED display screen (with a resolution of 1,080 by 2,160 pixels), complemented with a dual camera configuration on the rear side (12 megapixel camera, plus a 5 megapixel sensor) and a secondary 12 megapixel camera on the front side. The phablet boasts Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 660 chip set (eight cores), aided with 4 gigabytes of random access memory (RAM) and 64 gigabytes of built in storage. It comes with a non-removable 3,900 mAh battery, and is powered by Google’s Android 7.1.1 Nougat mobile operating system.
For those who missed the news a little more than a week ago, Vivo’s under-display fingerprint scanning tech basically allows mobile users to have their identities verified by placing their finger on the device’s screen. What makes this new tech so cool and unique is that the process does not make use of any home button -- instead, a target just appears on the lock screen, and when the owner of the device touches that target with his or her finger, the handset gets unlocked.
Fingerprint sensor technology has really taken off in the last half decade, and as of last year, every high profile smartphone release was sort of expected to automatically include this feature. Most of what people see in those devices are the typical front or rear mounted scanners. The only exception is Apple’s iPhone X (whose days may be numbered), which has done away with the fingerprint reader altogether, and instead replaced with its own face scanning technology called Face ID.
