Recently, a report stating that Samsung’s upcoming flagship phablet, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 will be packing an iris scanner recently surfaced. This might have been a bit far fetched but it is possible as Samsung recently announced a tablet in India, the Galaxy Tab Iris which features an iris scanner and will be used by India’s banks, enterprises, financial and educational institutions as a way to progress towards more secure authentication and verification process and help the country transition away from traditional authentication processes.
Those claims reported earlier are even more believable now as it has been reported that Korean-based camera module-maker Patron will be supplying the iris camera modules to Samsung for the upcoming Galaxy Note 7. The company reportedly won the bid from Samsung a few months ago to supply the entire volume of iris camera modules for its upcoming flagship phablet. The report also highlighted that Korean-based Samsung has been contemplating to include iris scanner technology in its devices including in its Samsung Galaxy S4 flagship back in 2013 but decided against it last minute as iris scanning back then was still in its infancy and was not as user friendly as a fingerprint scanner. According to renders which have recently leaked online, the upcoming Note 7 will feature two cameras on the front, one will be used for selfies and the other will be used for iris scanning.
A bit on iris scanners and it’s capabilities, iris scanning is a more secured way to protect a users phone compared to the now widely used fingerprint scanner as it has the ability to recognize 266 traits on a users iris compared to just the 40 traits recognized by current fingerprint scanners. That is a whooping 226 traits more that can be scanned by iris scanners compared to fingerprint scanners. Also, Samsung will reportedly announce the Note 7 on August 2nd of this year and Samsung will reportedly be calling it’s upcoming flagship phablet, the Galaxy Note 7 instead of the Galaxy Note 6, given that the last Galaxy Note device was the Galaxy Note 5, is to bring the Galaxy Note lineup in line with the Galaxy S lineup.