Is Samsung teasing a retinal scanner for their next big smartphone?
We thought the Samsung Galaxy S5 was a bit ridiculous with all the extra bells and whistles it comes packed with, but Samsung’s next flagship could expose us to even more cutting edge goodness. Samsung’s Exynos Twitter account Tweeted out a photo of a phone with an eye being scanned. “Unlock the future,” it says. The caption on the Tweet itself reads:
Security can be improved using features unique to us. That’s what we envision. What would you use? #ExynosTomorrow
And as we all know, Samsung is the one company that strives to implement all the interesting things they envision. They did so on the Samsung Galaxy S5 with a heart rate monitor and a fingerprint scanner. The former serves to help users keep up an active lifestyle, while the fingerprint scanner brings our first taste of biometric security.
How would a retinal scanner work? We imagine it’ll be a bite-sized version of infrared-based imaging sensors used by optometrists. Unlike an ordinary camera, these sensors can finely map the unique blood vessel patterns within a person’s eye. This could make for an even more secure biometric scanner than the Samsung Galaxy S5’s fingerprint scanner as the human eye is not an easy thing to emulate.
Earlier Samsung Galaxy S5 rumors suggested that particular device would have retinal scanners, though it obviously didn’t. Today’s revelation does confirm that Samsung was thinking about it, though, so perhaps it just wasn’t ready for prime time.
Quite a bit of time has passed since then and we could see them taking a stab at a consumer-ready solution with oh, say, the Samsung Galaxy Note 4. Whether that happens remains to be seen, but with Samsung’s history of pulling out all of the stops with each release of the Note lineup we imagine they won’t be afraid to take a chance. Would you use this feature should it ever come to light?