BARCELONA—The under-display fingerprint sensor on the Samsung Galaxy S10+ works better with wet fingers than the physical sensor on the Galaxy S9+, but doesn't work as well with dry fingers in our first test with the new phone. I'm in Spain testing the device ahead of Mobile World Congress.
The Galaxy S10+ is the first phone we've seen with an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor, rather than a physical fingerprint sensor or the optical sensor OnePlus uses in its OnePlus 6T phone. The advantage of the ultrasonic sensor, according to manufacturer Qualcomm, is that it works better with wet and dirty fingers. In a few hours' testing, I found that it does work better with wet fingers, but that neither ultrasonic nor physical sensors work well with sticky fingers.
More annoyingly, the sensor doesn't work as well with dry fingers as a physical sensor does, I think in large part because there's no physical guide for where to put your finger, leading to a lot of off-center presses. The S10 phones also have facial recognition, but they warn you that it isn't as secure as the fingerprint sensor.
The fingerprint sensing area is a small spot near the bottom of the phone. There's no physical guide to it, and you do have to press that spot precisely. An off-center touch won't work, and too quick a tap will result in a message saying, "Keep your finger on the sensor a little longer." A definite press of the pad of your finger is the best bet.
My results with dry fingers depended on the style of touch and which finger I used. With a definite press of my right thumb, I got 100 percent accuracy. With my left thumb, I only got 80 percent, perhaps because of the different angle I was pressing at. With quick, thoughtless touches or swipes of my thumb, recognition went down to 50 to 60 percent, leading me to turn facial recognition on.
On the S9+, I got 85 percent accuracy over 20 touches, in between the two finger results on the S10. That went up to 100 percent when I put the S9+ in a case that guided my finger to the location of its sensor. (That's my experience with the sensor on the Google Pixel 3 as well; a case helps me locate the sensor and brings recognition to nearly 100 percent.) The S9+'s sensor feels faster, though, and I'm more quickly able to reposition and recover my finger than I am on the S10.
With a wet thumb on the S10, I got a 72 percent recognition rate across 40 presses. That's much better than on the S9+, which doesn't work with a wet finger at all.
I'm testing the S10+ with slightly pre-final software, so I'll test it again after the phone hits shelves on March 8. For more early assessments, see our benchmark results and our Bright Night shootout.
Hands-on with the Samsung Galaxy S10s
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