Yeah, dedicated fingerprint readers were so nice. On-screen readers are slow, require you to look to align your finger, and unreliable since the thumb gets most of the abuse. Also, I usually have to press the power button when taking my phone out of my pocket to wake it up to bother to scan my thumb. Sometimes, I will be perfectly aligned on the reader and nothing happens… Until I pick up my finger and then it activates the reader and scolds me for moving my finger too fast. These are just neat tech demos, one step forward for the tech, but two steps back for functionality.

I’m afraid we’ll never see separate fingerprint readers again since it puts the cost and manufacturing burden on the screen manufacturers.