Despite being a more affordable counterpart to last year’s flagship, it is starting to look like the next Pixel 6A could offer a key improvement over the Pixel 6 series: a faster fingerprint sensor. This is according to Fazli Halim, a Malaysian youtuber who appears to have gotten his hands on Google’s next device a month before its official launch on July 28th. We saw the video through 9to5Google.
Maybe it’s good news after the Pixel 6 series fingerprint sensors ended up being a surprisingly weak spot for devices and were noticeably slower to authenticate than other phones. “The fingerprint scanner is the only biometric authentication available and it’s not very good,” Dan Seifert wrote in our review. A Google support account later suggested that the device’s “enhanced security algorithms” were to blame for the slowness. Subsequently, the company has tried to resolve issues with software updates, but complaints persist.
Better performance in the mid-range model?
The Pixel 6A’s fingerprint sensor looks more promising. You can see the comparison around the 4:55 mark in the video above, when Halim is shown trying to unlock the Pixel 6A on the left and the Pixel 6 Pro on the right. After a brief tap of the finger, the Pixel 6A unlocks, while the Pixel 6 Pro often has issues and instead asks the user to “Hold down a little longer.” It is not night or day; the 6A sometimes doesn’t unlock after a brief tap, and other times the 6 Pro unlocks well, but the 6A seems to be more reliable overall.
As 9to5Google points out, the Pixel 6A device shown in the video is unlikely to run finished software, so the comparison may not exactly match user experiences when it is officially launched. But it is consistent with comments made by Google hardware chief Rick Osterloh at Android Central last month, which confirmed that the Pixel 6A is shipped with a fingerprint sensor to the device other than the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro.
A Google representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.