Electronic device performing finger biometric pre-matching and related methods

An electronic device comprising:

• a housing;
• a finger biometric sensor carried by said housing and to sense a user's finger adjacent thereto;
• a memory for storing finger matching biometric data and a subset of finger matching biometric data;
• a wireless transceiver carried by said housing;
• a finger-operated user input device carried by said housing;
• an orientation sensor to sense a device orientation relative to a surface of Earth;
• and
• a processor coupled to said wireless transceiver to perform at least wireless communications function and to said finger biometric sensor to, based upon operation of said finger-operated user input device
• acquire finger matching biometric data from said finger biometric sensor,
• perform a finger pre-matching between a subset of the acquired finger matching biometric data and the subset of stored finger matching biometric data and based upon context data to generate pre-match data, the context data comprising a last match index and a last device orientation sensed from the orientation sensor, and
• perform a finger matching between the acquired finger biometric data and the stored finger matching biometric data based upon the pre-match data.

A method of matching finger biometric data in electronic device comprising a finger biometric sensor to sense a user's finger adjacent thereto, a memory for storing the finger matching biometric data and a subset of finger matching biometric data, and a processor coupled to the finger biometric sensor, the method comprising:

• acquiring finger matching biometric data from the finger biometric sensor;
• performing a finger pre-matching between a subset of the acquired finger matching biometric data and the subset of stored finger matching biometric data and based upon context data to generate pre-match data, the context data comprising at least one of a last match index and a last device orientation sensed from an orientation sensor to sense an orientation of the electronic device relative to a surface of Earth;
• and
• performing a finger matching between the acquired finger biometric data and the stored finger matching biometric data based upon the pre-match data.