Not Apple! Qualcomm to help take your Smartphone to Seabed

Waterproof smartphones to be a reality with Qualcoom’s new under-display sensors

How smart will the smartphones become than just snappy OS updates? For smartphone-users looking into hardware future and want to deep dive underwater with your smartphone, Qualcomm has got it for you. Qualcomm recently claims to be the first to unveil produce under-display sensors. The smartphone market is helming towards bezel-free and sleek phones. Hence, cheeky smartphone buttons seems difficult for seamless user-experience.

The company revealed that its next-gen fingerprint sensors will use ultrasonic technology that can be fitted under displays, glass and metal, and can scan through OLED displays up to 1200um.

The sensors, expected in the first half of 2018, can even be used underwater, and can detect heart beat and blood flow whether the screen is on or off.

These new sensors bring the capability to not only work under metal and glass like the previous generation, but also under the display which is one of the biggest engineering challenges of smartphones today.

What makes their solution even more interesting is that at this moment, Qualcomm is already announcing compatibility for these sensors with their newly announced Snapdragon 660 and 630 mobile platforms.

It can also operate through metal and glass surfaces combined with a glass thickness of up to 800 μm and an aluminum thickness of up to 650 μm. If under only glass, it can sense a fingerprint effectively through up to 800 μm.

The company also announced plan to improve its entry-level gear with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 octa-core chips.

Built on a 14nm process, these chips offer a marked step up from their 435 processor predecessor, including a four-hour battery life extension and a 25 percent increase in graphics performance.

Vivo, Huawei, Xiaomi can be the early adopters of this next-gen chips.