Hiroshi Lockheimer, Senior Vice President (SVP) at Google and one of the founding members of Android, has caused a stir with an image he posted on Twitter. While Lockheimer demonstrated Google's new Material You design language in Android 12, other details caught people's attention.
Undoubtedly, the screenshot is from a device running stock Android, and not a custom version like Oxygen OS or One UI. Hence, it seems likely that Lockheimer posted from a Pixel smartphone. No current or previous Pixel smartphones have in-display fingerprint scanners though, as the UI element beneath the clock indicates.
Consequently, Mishaal Rahman of XDA Developers asserted that Lockheimer captured the screenshot on a Pixel 6 Pro, which Google has already confirmed has an in-display fingerprint scanner. For reference, Lockheimer deleted the tweet shortly after posting it, so we suspect that it contained information that Google was not ready to share yet.
While the image below is smaller than the expected display resolutions of the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, it offers some information about which device it was taken from and the fingerprint scanner's placement. As it stands, Twitter compressed the image to 2,048 x 945 pixels, but this can be resized to 3,121 x 1,440 pixels without adjusting the aspect ratio. The image is about 59 pixels too tall to be from the Pixel 6, so the Pixel 6 Pro is the more likely candidate.
Based on our calculations, the centre of the fingerprint icon lies roughly 25% from the bottom of the screenshot, which converts to 1.65-inches from the display's bottom edge for the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro. In our opinion, the fingerprint scanner's placement looks a little high to the device with one hand. However, we would recommend reserving any judgement until Google releases the Pixel 6 series this autumn.