Biometric sensors are gradually becoming a trend feature in smartphones recently. The feature was first used by Apple in its iPhone 5c last year. Soon other companies like Samsung and HTC started to add this feature in their flagship phones. Samsung, first incorporated fingerprint scanning in Galaxy S5 and now it the company is planning to expand its offering to other devices mostly low-end.
Moving beyond fingerprint scanning, Samsung is looking towards other options like iris scanning. Iris recognition was a feature widely rumored to be in the works in the run up to the Galax S5 announcement, however so far no mainstream smartphone has shipped an implementation of this kind of biometric sensor.
“We’re looking at various types of biometric [mechanisms] and one of things that everybody is looking at is iris detection,” Samsung’s senior vice president Rhee In-jong told analysts and investors at a forum in Hong Kong.
Iris detection is basically eye scanning technology for security purpose. According to Rhee this will first come to high-end devices moving to low-end ones.Rhee, who is behind development of Samsung’s Knox security software, noted there are around 1.8 million active Knox users of the approximately 87 million devices that come with the software pre-installed.
Different forms of mobile security features are becoming important and necessary due to increasing practice of BYOD culture.
Source: WSJ