Sony Xperia XZ and Xperia X Compact sold in the US will not have fingerprint scanners

Sony fans in the US, brace yourselves for some disappointing news. The Xperia XZ and Xperia X Compact phones sold in the US will not have fingerprint scanners.

The phones were launched at the IFA tech show in Berlin, earlier this month, and the variants sold outside the US will have a fingerprint scanner embedded in the power button on the side.

Phone Arena spotted that the devices’ page Sony’s US website, do not mention the fingerprint scanner. Here is the Xperia XZ page, and here is the Xperia X Compact listing, and you can see that for yourself.

If this gives you a déjà vu feeling, you are not wrong. Sony did the same thing with the Xperia Z5 and the Xperia Z5C, earlier this year. The reason behind this remains unknown, but we can only speculate that there are some patent issues, which prevents the company from including the sensors on the US variants of the phone.

But the secret thing that you should know is that the fingerprint scanner is indeed present on the phone. Yes, as I mentioned above the power button does house the sensor, but it’s disabled in the firmware the device ships with. You can enable it (on the Z5) by following some instructions on XDA to flash a different firmware, to enable the fingerprint scanner. Hopefully this applies to the XZ and the X Compact as well.