As many iPhone early-adopters have noted, touchscreens are prone to being covered in greasy fingerprints after even light use. Obviously, someone at Nokia has realised this and decided to ‘leverage’ the phone+dabs combination by patenting a novel use for fingerprint recognition.
Nokia’s patent details not only a method of using a touch-sensitive display as a fingerprint scanner, but also a way of associating unique actions with the prints from different fingers.
Swiping your index finger over the screen could open your contacts list, say, and then a quick smear from your thumb might send an email. Perhaps you could expand the list of shortcuts by using your toes - who knows? At this stage it really is too early to tell.
Quite how practical this would be in action remains to be seen (particularly if you try doing it one-handed) but it one-ups Apple, and surely that is the main thing.
I think nowadays all phones should have fingerprint readers. When I was in Australia a company called AuthenTec they have ben working with a lot of wireless equipments including cell phones and they could add on them fingerprint sensors.
Nowadays almost everything is converting to fingerprint readers, like fingerprint passports, fingerprint washingmachines, fingerprint guns etc. I too for my PC security got a good deal from M2SYS (www.m2sys.com) to buy fingerprint reader to protect my computer.
Nokia has always been one of theeeeeee most innovative cell phones and came up wth creative ideas and world leaders in the cell phone market but I am surprised that they took such a long time to bring out cell phones with Fingerprint sensors. Anyhow I’m looking forward to this new Nokia phone with a fingerrint sensor.