Fingerprint Scanner
The Vivo X20 Plus UD will be the first smartphone to feature Synaptics Clear ID in-display fingerprint scanner. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

Last week during CES 2018, Chinese phone maker Vivo showcased its very first smartphone with an in-display fingerprint scanner. Now it’s been revealed that the phone will be called the Vivo X20 Plus UD and that the handset has already been certified in China.

The Vivo X20 Plus UD was first spotted on TENAA’s official website. TENAA is China’s telecommunications regulator. With the phone popping up on its website, it means that it will soon go on sale in China very soon. TENAA’s listing for the handset also revealed the X20 Plus UD’s full specs.

The Vivo X20 Plus UD comes with a 6.43-inch AMOLED display with a full HD+ screen resolution of 1,080 x 2,160 with an 18:9 aspect ratio. Inside, the device is being powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 2.2 GHz octa-core processor with an Adreno 512 GPU. It also comes with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. There’s a microSD card slot that allows users to expand storage up to 256GB.

On the back, the Vivo X20 Plus UD comes with a pair of cameras; one with a 12-megapixel sensor, and another with a 5-megapixel sensor. The 12MP primary shooter comes with an f/1.8 aperture lens and features optical image stabilization (OIS). Up front, the Vivo phone has another 12MP camera with an f/2.0 aperture lens and it has its own front-facing LED flash.

The Vivo X20 Plus UD also has a decent 3,800mAh battery that supports fast charging. On the software side of things, it’s listed as running Android 7.1.1 Nougat with Funtouch OS 3.2 running on top. Overall, the X20 Plus UD is very similar to the regular vivo X20 Plus, which was released back in October 2017. The only differences here is that the UD model has a slightly smaller battery (the X20 Plus has a 3,900mAh battery), and the lack of a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner.

The Vivo X20 Plus UD will be the very first smartphone to be released commercially with an in-display fingerprint scanner from Synaptics. Vivo showcased the device during CES 2018 and the in-display fingerprint scanner has mostly been received positively by those lucky enough to have had time to try it out. However, the common complaint that members of the press had was that it was a tad bit slower than current-generation fingerprint sensors that’s already available today. Despite that criticism, it’s still undeniably promising for the future of smartphones. It will undoubtedly start a trend and other phone manufacturers will soon start adopting the same tech.

The Vivo X20 Plus UD is rumored to cost 3,698 Yuan in China, which is around US$575, according to PocketNow. The price might be a bit expensive for a mid-range handset, but the inclusion of that in-display fingerprint scanner might be enough to prove that it's worth the price.