Is Samsung Hinting at In-Display Biometrics for the Galaxy S10?

Another year, another coy invitation from Samsung to its upcoming ‘Unpacked’ event, where the company will unveil its next flagship smartphone.

The company’s latest invitation is even more tight-lipped about what’s in store than last year’s. At that time, Samsung’s Unpacked invitation made it pretty clear that the focus for its Galaxy S9 smartphone would be the camera, asserting, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, the latest member of the Galaxy family has a lot to say.” Its newest invitation, however, says only that the company will “usher in new Galaxy experiences based on 10 years of innovations.”

There may be a hint of what’s to come in the looping video graphic embedded in Samsung’s invitation, which shows the numbers “1” and “0” bobbing up and down across a horizontal black line across the screen. If that line is meant to represent the surface of a device display, the passage of the numbers through it might hint that the Galaxy S10 will indeed feature an under-display fingerprint sensor, as some speculation has held.

In any case, it’s also fair to expect an improved version of Intelligent Scan, the combined facial and iris recognition system introduced in the Samsung Galaxy S9 last year. With Samsung having previously sought to distinguish itself with iris-based authentication, its embrace of facial recognition for the S9 was seen by many as a response to Apple’s introduction of Face ID with the iPhone X toward the end of 2017; now, with Apple having definitely switched to 3D facial recognition with all of last year’s iPhones, some are speculating that Samsung will upgrade the face-scanning component of Intelligent Scan from 2D to 3D.

That will help Samsung to keep up with its arch-rival; but the introduction of in-display fingerprint scanning could get the company a step ahead, while also helping to fend off China-based rivals who have already embraced in-display technology in their own devices.

We’ll know more about what Samsung really has up its sleeve on February 20th, when its Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event will be held in San Francisco.

(Originally posted on Mobile ID World)