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Vivo beats Apple to an under-display fingerprint scanner
There have been rumours of Apple exploring under-display fingerprint scanning technology, but you probably didn't expect the first of such demos to come from China. At MWC Shanghai, Qualcomm announced its latest ultrasonic fingerprint solution, with the new highlights being its integration underneath OLED displays (up to 1.2mm-thick), as well as working fine even when the device is immersed in water. As before, this tech can tolerate dirt and sweat on skin better than its capacitive counterpart, and it also works underneath metal and glass (duh) but with increased penetration -- up to 800um for glass and up to 650um for aluminum, as opposed to the old 400um for either material.
Xiaomi's Mi 5s hides a fingerprint reader under its glass
We were already big fans of Xiaomi's Mi 5 flagship smartphone, so it's only natural for the Chinese company to build on this model's success by bringing us the Mi 5s. It should be no surprise that this dual-SIM device -- which has ditched the glass body in favor of metal -- packs Qualcomm's latest and greatest Snapdragon 821 chipset (as featured on the ASUS ZenFone 3 Deluxe), meaning it offers not only improved computational performance but also super speedy tri-band 4G carrier aggregation. As a bonus, it features up to 128GB of fast UFS 2.0 storage plus up to 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, and NFC is still there on the back. But what really got our attention this time is the new under-glass ultrasonic fingerprint reader on the front.
Qualcomm's next chips will help smartphones think for themselves
Qualcomm teased the prospect of smartphones that learn a couple of years ago, and it's now much closer to making them a practical reality. The chip designer has revealed its next big mobile processor, the Snapdragon 820, will be one of the first that can handle its Zeroth cognitive computing platform. In short, it'll let your phone learn about you (and the world around you) to take action on its own. You should see photo apps that detect whole scenes, security tools that protect against unknown viruses and interfaces that depend more on expressions and head movement than button taps. It gets more ambitious than that, though. Zeroth allows for always-on sensors that detect your surroundings (such as through motion or sound) and help your phone anticipate what you want.
