Rumor: Samsung provides Galaxy A50 phone with in-screen fingerprint scanner

Samsung is said to be preparing the release of the Galaxy A50, a midrange smartphone with a fingerprint scanner behind the screen. So far, the South Korean manufacturer does not have a single smartphone with a scanner behind the display.

This would involve an ultrasonic scanner, in contrast to the optical scanners behind the screen from manufacturers such as Huawei and OnePlus, 91Mobiles reports. An optical scanner works with a camera behind the screen that creates an image of the fingerprint, while an ultrasonic scanner tries to read the fingerprint through ultrasound.

The site has pictures of the phone’s body with no components inside. Those photos show, among other things, a notch in the screen for the front camera, a USB-c port and a 3.5 mm jack. The phone would also have a 4000mAh battery.

The soc would be an Exynos 9610, an octacore with four Cortex A73 cores up to 2.3GHz and four Cortex A53 cores, assisted by a Mali G72MP3 GPU. The 10nm-soc has a modem that supports 4G up to 600Mbit/s down and 150Mbit/s up.

There would be three cameras on the back, but what kind of cameras they are is unknown. 91Mobiles speculates that one of the three is a Time of Flight sensor to create 3D images of the environment. Such sensors are also in other recent smartphones such as the Honor View 20 and Oppo RX17 Pro.

The naming would be different from previous years. Samsung has been working in the Galaxy A series for a few years now with increasing single digits per year, such as the Galaxy A5 (2016) and Galaxy A3 (2017). The most recent models are last year’s A7 and A9, with three and four cameras on the back respectively.

It would not be the first Samsung phone with a notch in the screen. Earlier this week, Samsung announced the Galaxy M20 and M30, devices with a notched LCD and a 5000mAh battery.