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Vlad Savov from The Verge reports of his experience using the first smartphone with a fingerprint scanner built into the display: After an entire year of speculation about whether Apple or Samsung might integrate the fingerprint sensor under the display of their flagship phones, it is actually China's Vivo that has gotten there first. At CES 2018, I got to grips with the first smartphone to have this futuristic tech built in, and I was left a little bewildered by the experience. The mechanics of setting up your fingerprint on the phone and then using it to unlock the device and do things like authenticate payments are the same as with a traditional fingerprint sensor. The only difference I experienced was that the Vivo handset was slower -- both to learn the contours of my fingerprint and to unlock once I put my thumb on the on-screen fingerprint prompt -- but not so much as to be problematic. Basically, every other fingerprint sensor these days is ridiculously fast and accurate, so with this being newer tech, its slight lag feels more palpable. Vivo is using a Synaptics optical sensor called Clear ID that works by peering through the gaps between the pixels in an OLED display (LCDs wouldn't work because of their need for a backlight) and scanning your uniquely patterned epidermis. The sensor is already in mass production and should be incorporated in several flagship devices later this year.

jki writes "A historical moment for Openchallenge as a challenge has now went through the full circle. 18th August Mace Moneta submitted a challenge to develop open source Linux drivers for the Synaptics cPad (cPad is an LCD-equipped touchpad that provides notebook users with a secondary display as well as touch interface and navigation) integrated to Toshiba Satellite 5100-501 for example. Now, today Rob Miller submitted the solution implementing GPL'd Linux drivers. I am so thrilled to see Openchallenge really working -- I hope this opens the flood gates!"