Hi, in today's article I decided to talk about the most popular options for the location of the fingerprint scanner and its implementation from different manufacturers.
Lenovo / Moto
Since the days of Lenovo ZUK, the company has been using a scanner on the front side, it is slightly recessed into the body and is also a touch button. It's nice that to turn on the smartphone, just touch the scanner and that there is no button built into it. By default, a bunch of scanner + on-screen buttons is used, but in the Moto settings you can enable navigation exclusively by the scanner. The onscreen buttons disappear, a left-to-right swipe mimics the Back action, and a right-to-left swipe mimics recent apps.
A pleasant addition was not only turning on, but also turning off the display by holding the center key. By the way, Moto has implemented this feature in an interesting way. If you have disabled the onscreen buttons, then holding the button for a second turns off the display, and a two second brings up Google Now.
Samsung
Samsung has long used a combination of a physical button and two touchscreens on the sides. Personally, I didn't really like it, in horizontal mode you will definitely hit one of them.
The latest Galaxy ditched this approach in favor of a scanner on the back. It is not entirely clear why the arrangement is asymmetrical, but despite this, the new version is still more convenient than the past.
Meizu
Meizu uses the proprietary mTouch key. It is both a fingerprint scanner, a physical button, and a touch key. To turn the display on or off, you need to hold the button for about a second. Touching the key simulates pressing 'Back', and in applications with fingerprint authorization, Flyme understands that you need to scan your finger, and not go to the previous display.
Xiaomi
The Xiaomi in most models has a fingerprint scanner on the back, and a three-button touchpad is installed in the front. A nice feature is the fine-tuning of actions for short and long presses of each button.
Sony
Sony is almost the only company to install a fingerprint scanner on the side of the power button. The solution is original and elegant in its own way, but it has a small drawback: if you want to see notifications without unlocking the display, then you have to manage to turn on the device so that it does not have time to unlock the display.
HTC
Smartphones HTC also have a fingerprint sensor as a touch button. There are two other touch-sensitive keys on either side of it. The arrangement of the elements in the latest flagship, in my opinion, is not the best. They take up a lot of space, and for some reason they are located asymmetrically.
Conclusion
Personally, I like the most when the fingerprint scanner is located on the front panel, paired with the on-screen keys. I understand that such placement can negatively affect the dimensions, but no matter how much I used devices with a scanner on the back, it was inconvenient every time. In this regard, the variant from Moto is good, besides, if you wish, they can hide these keys and do everything with a scanner button.
However, our readers often write that they like the option Xiaomi with a touch panel and a scanner on the back, as this option does not use up useful space on the display.