Reports: Fingerprint Mobile – Mobile

From the turn of the century onwards, it has regularly launched mobiles, PDAs, tablets and other gadgets with built-in fingerprint reader. In most cases, it was all about niche products for specific markets or customers with special security requirements, but when Apple bought biometrics company Authentec and presented the iPhone 5S with Touch ID exploding interest. Today it would be almost unthinkable to launch a premium handset without the fingerprint sensor or any other type of biometric login.

Fingerprint sensors in mobile phones is about making it easy to get good security. You can quickly unlock your phone and you do not use your PIN code in environments where there are many people who can see what you enter, says Jörgen Lantto, CEO of Fingerprint Cards.

Fingerprint Cards, headquartered Gothenburg, together with Synaptics and Idex one of the largest companies in the global market when it comes to sensors for fingerprint. The company was founded in 1997 and showed in 1999 a prototype of a fingerprint reader for mobiles in collaboration with Ericsson. The first major customers were Chinese banks that needed a technical solution to prevent the employees from borrowing each other’s terminals and making erroneous transfers.

Jörgen Lantto says that there are two main types of fingerprint readers – “swipe” and “touch” . Around 2010 began Fingerprint Cards developing its first sensors were crisp products in mobiles. It was the swipe sensors that builds up a picture of the fingerprint when you slide your finger over the reader. Today is the touch sensors that are demanded by the market and it will go just as easy to scan your fingerprint as pressing a button. It is the type of sensor that Apple uses and it works on lknande way with the sensors Fingerprint Cards supplies, for example, Huawei Honor 7 and the two new Nexus mobiles from Google.

Apple is currently leading the development and have both managed to get the technology into models that sell well and standardized interface with APIs that allow app developers can take advantage of the reader. Although several Android mobiles – for example, the Motorola Atrix 4G – began to be sold before the iPhone 5S as it is the first Android 6.0 Marshmallow that technology becomes a part of the system and an app with support for fingerprint can function in phones from different brands.