A new Galaxy S8 report just surfaced, and it claims that the phone will feature a facial recognition feature in addition to the iris scanning mechanism. Now, this report comes from the Korean Economic Daily, and the purpose of including a facial recognition feature is to improve the speed and reliability of biometric authentication, at least according to the source. Now, in addition to all that, the Galaxy S8 will also feature a fingerprint scanner which will be located next to its rear-facing camera, as many of you know already, thanks to leaks.
“Due to some limits of iris scanning such as speed and accuracy, we have decided to add facial recognition to the Galaxy S8. With a face scanner, it will take less than 0.01 seconds to unlock the phone,” said Samsung’s official. It seems like Samsung believes that the Galaxy S8 users will benefit from this new facial recognition feature, and that they may not even reach back to use the fingerprint scanner. The location of that fingerprint scanner is rather odd, it’s usually placed below the camera sensor so it’s easy to reach, it remains to be seen how useful will it be considering its placement. All in all, it seems like Samsung is trying to push users to use their iris scanning and facial recognition features, rather than a fingerprint scanner, but we’ll see what happens. If Samsung’s official is right, and the phone indeed unlocks in less than 0.01 seconds without any issues, then this new feature might even appeal to users, but we’re still wondering how useful will it be in darker environments.
The Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus smartphones got certified by the FCC quite recently, and the two phones will be announced on March 29, as Samsung confirmed during MWC 2017. The two phones will be made out of metal and glass, and both of them will ship with a curved Super AMOLED display up front. The Galaxy S8 is said to sport a 5.8-inch display, while the ‘Plus’ variant will come with a 6.2-inch panel. The Snapdragon 835 SoC will probably fuel these two phones in the US, while most other markets will get Samsung’s very own Exynos 8895 SoC which was announced quite recently.