Barring the immediate privacy concerns raised by a facial scanner on a consumer electronic device, Apple’s Face ID has recently come under scrutiny for simply not being as effective as advertised.
Still, device manufacturers — including China-based OnePlus — are slowly working on their own responses to Face ID, and it now looks like Samsung’s ready to up its game, too.
According to NDTV, Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S9 flagship smartphone will feature an improved Iris Scanner that will rival the iPhone X’s Face ID feature.
Samsung first included an iris scanner on the Galaxy Note 7 and is also available on the Galaxy S8/S8+ and the Note 8. However, instead of improving the scanner’s existing hardware — like Apple did for the iPhone X’s TrueDepth camera that’s responsible for Face ID — Samsung will be focusing on building a software improvement.
The rumours come from Korean-based ETNews, which reported that Samsung will “increase iris recognition and facial recognition speed while maintaining the same basic parts specification and structure as the previous one.”
Samsung’s current iris scanning technology isn’t particularly protective, as it can be beat using a photograph. The goal, therefore, is no doubt to find a way to prevent the infringement of user privacy, without necessarily building a new technology from the ground up.
Source: NDTV, Android Authority
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