LG has developed a technology that will hide a smartphone's home button and fingerprint sensor, the company announced Monday.
Instead of being visible and/or physical, the home button and fingerprint sensor will be under a smartphone's front glass panel, but not under the display itself.
LG claims its buttonless home button/fingerprint sensor module has a lower "false recognition rate" rate — the probability that the system falsely recognizes someone else's fingerprint. So it's a little safer, but apart from that, there's little practical use here.
However, the LG's tech would allow for the fingerprint sensor to be hidden, too, which has traditionally needed to protrude from a smartphone's glass panel.
It could improve smartphone design so they can look sleeker and more modern by appearing more "minimalist." Indeed, conventional home buttons "interrupt" a smartphone's flat front panel, as they prevent the glass front panel from being a solid, seamless piece of glass without port holes.
Touch buttons are nothing new. LG was one of the first companies to introduce seamless touch buttons with its "Chocolate" phone way back in 2006.
Some smartphone companies like HTC have already replaced the physical button that you mechanically press down with a touch sensor, like the iPhone has. Yet, despite the touch sensor, there's still a clear interruption on the front panel.
The only thing left to interrupt a smartphone's front panel is the earpiece speaker at the top for phone calls, but engineers will have to figure out a way to let sound out through glass without the sound getting too muffled.
We'd bet that this technology will be featured on future LG smartphones, but that's purely speculation.
Not every innovation has to do something new and "revolutionary." Sometimes, they just make our current gadgets look more better, and that's totally fine by us.
