The newly introduced Honor 7 from Huawei, has a fingerprint sensor on the back of the device. Powered by the Trustzone technology that helps in securing the data and saving the fingerprint data locally, the fingerprint sensor not just helps unlock the phone but also do a lot more.
Let’s talk about the sensor and it’s speed. Frankly, this was one of the quickest to recognize the fingerprint and it takes in data from any angle, as it has 360-degree unlock, and the sensor is said to be self learning, where the sensitivity gets better and higher with use. After a while, even if the finger is wet, the fingerprint would still be read and recognized.
For the time I used the phone, I loved the fact that the sensor works so perfectly and quickly, that even the Touch ID on Apple iPhone, and the scanner on OnePlus 2 come no close to this. Sometimes, I even felt whether the sensor is inaccurate to just unlock the device for any fingerprint for that speed, but it does the recognition part pretty well.
So, does the Fingerprint sensor help only in unlocking the phone? No. There are some possibilities, and this sensor on the back can act as a touch based panel for different functions.
- Single click: Clicking on the fingerprint sensor once to go back in the interface
- Touch and Hold: Touching and holding on the fingerprint sensor takes you back to the home screen
- Touch and Hold in camera app: Touching and holding on the fingerprint sensor captures a photo or video, when the camera app is running
- Answering a call: Touching and holding on the fingerprint sensor when there is an incoming call will let the user answer the call
- Stopping an alarm: When an alarm goes off, touching and holding the fingerprint sensor will turn off the alarm. Not that it might really help always, but this sure an added feature
Sliding for Notification panel: The notification panel can be pretty much controlled by the sliding function on fingerprint sensor. Sliding down in the sensor pulls the notification panel open, and sliding up closes it. Double tapping while the notification panel is on the screen, clears all the notifications.
Slide up: When you aren’t playing with the notification panel, sliding up in the fingerprint sensor opens up the recent apps / multitasking section.
There’s a clear message in the settings page, saying that these functions will work with any finger and not just the ones whose fingerprint is registered, since these are just touch-based functions.
So, here’s how much can be done with the same fingerprint sensor on the back of Honor 7, which is any way one of the fastest fingerprint scanners currently.
