Vivo's X20 Smartphone With Under-Display Sensor Is 'Well-Ahead' of Face ID, Says ABI

The Vivo X20 Plus UD smartphone and its under-display fingerprint sensor is “well ahead of Apple’s face recognition technology,” said a Wednesday ABI teardown report. Apple abandoned the sapphire sensor in the iPhone X in favor of Face ID, but the company “may now be forced to return to fingerprint sensors in the next iPhone,” said ABI analyst Dimitrios Pavlakis, citing growing relevance of fingerprint sensors. More banking and payment service providers are employing fingerprint sensing, which is five times as difficult to spoof as face recognition, said Pavlakis. Vivo didn’t make complete use of an under-display fingerprint sensor technology from Synaptics -- choosing to retain a large border below the display at the bottom of the phone, leaving room to fall back to a traditional sensor below the display, said ABI analyst Jim Mielke. Traditional fingerprint sensors are either embedded under the home key on the front of the mobile phone or on the back of the phone, but placing the fingerprint sensor under the display on the front of the phone “should allow for a borderless display on three sides,” said the analysts.