OnePlus 6T vs Vivo V11 Pro: In-display Fingerprint Scanner Showdown

The OnePlus 6T is now official and although it isn’t a whole lot different from the OnePlus 6, it does bring in some cool new features which might appeal to a large audience. The device features pretty much the same internals as the OnePlus 6, but it packs in a bigger 6.41-inch display, a larger 3,700mAh battery, and an in-display fingerprint scanner called Screen Unlock.

Here, we’ll be taking a closer look at Screen Unlock on the OnePlus 6T and compare it with the under-display scanner on the recently launched Vivo V11 Pro. In terms of hardware, both the devices feature the same 4th-gen under-display fingerprint scanner from Synaptics, but there’s a significant difference in the way OnePlus has implemented the scanner on their device.

I used the Vivo V11 Pro quite extensively back when it was launched and I was pretty impressed by the performance of the in-display fingerprint scanner. The company claimed that it was 10 percent faster than the previous gen scanners and 50 percent more secure, and while I can’t really comment on the security aspect, the fingerprint scanner did seem a tad bit faster.

In comparison with OnePlus’ implementation however, the in-display fingerprint scanner on the Vivo V11 Pro feels kinda sluggish. While the fingerprint scanner on the OnePlus 6T works quite instantaneously, the one on the Vivo V11 Pro takes a little longer. While I’m not sure how OnePlus managed to make it that fast, my best guess is that the company really optimized the software quite well for the fingerprint scanner to perform so well. However, there’s a major issue.

OnePlus seems to have forgotten that most, if not all, users tend to customize the wallpaper in order to make it their own, but if you’re going to do that with the OnePlus 6T, you’ll run into some trouble with Screen Unlock, at this stage. In my testing, the in-display fingerprint scanner slowed down considerably if I wasn’t using one of the stock wallpapers. I tested the issue out with a bunch of different wallpapers, using different lock screen/home screen wallpaper combinations, and the issue persisted. So, with a custom wallpaper on the OnePlus 6T, it’s no better than the Vivo V11 Pro in terms of the unlocking speed.

When compared to the capacitive fingerprint scanner on the OnePlus 6, the optical fingerprint scanner on the OnePlus 6T is just milliseconds slower. OnePlus claims that the in-display fingerprint scanner on the OnePlus 6T takes just 0.36 seconds to unlock and compared to the 0.2 seconds taken by the OnePlus 6, there’s hardly any difference. So if you’re switching to the OnePlus 6T from any device other than the OnePlus 6, you won’t be able to notice any difference.

In conclusion, Screen Unlock on the OnePlus 6T is currently the fastest in-display fingerprint scanner on a smartphone today and it definitely adds some value to the device. Using Screen Unlock on the OnePlus 6T is quite satisfactory and I often found myself unlocking the device over and over again without any rhyme or reason. I just hope OnePlus manages to fix the wallpaper related issue because I, for one, wouldn’t want to keep using the stock wallpapers on my smartphone.