Samsung’s Galaxy Note line has always been revered for touting tons of features over competitors. As a more premium and therefore expensive phone it’s basically expected that these types of phones will have more bells and whistles than others on the market, and the Galaxy Note 7 is no exception to this rule. Aside from sporting an IP68 water and dust resistant body, a first for a Galaxy Note phone, it also shares a similar design to the recently released Galaxy S7 Edge. This similar design features dual curved edges on its screen, although the curves here are designed a little differently in order to make the most use of space for the single biggest feature on any Galaxy Note phone, the S-Pen stylus.
But this time around it’s not water resistance or a faster processor that’s really making waves in the industry, it’s a brand new way to securely lock your phone that we haven’t seen on an Android powered phone before: an iris scanner. Instead of relying on touching a dedicated area on the phone to scan the fingerprint on your finger, the iris scanner is able to unlock the phone by simply looking at it. This powerful scanner is incredibly accurate and fast, so you don’t need to worry about getting things just perfectly for it to work, but of course there are some caveats to this technology and how it can be used. Fingerprint scanners have been getting better, more accurate and now have the ability to scan your fingerprint no matter what angle you touch them at.
With all this said, do we really need another way to unlock our phones, or is this one just a gimmick? At this point in time it’s a joke to sell a flagship phone without a fingerprint scanner; it’d be essentially like selling a smartphone without a camera. Consumers have come to expect such a feature to be included on every phone, but is the iris scanner good enough to change consumers’ perceptions yet again and make this the next defacto standard we’ll see on upcoming flagships? Take a look at our video review of the iris scanner on the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 as we take you through various ways of unlocking the phone and how the iris scanner compares with that tried-and-true fingerprint scanner, and don’t forget to enter our giveaway to get your very own Galaxy Note 7 for free!