Samsung smartphones to expand biometrics use with iris recognition

Samsung announced yesterday that it intends to incorporate biometric sensors into the majority of its mobile devices, including low-cost smartphones, according to a report that first appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

“As a market leader, we are following the market trend,” stated Rhee In-jong, a Samsung senior vice president, at an investor forum in Hong Kong. “We’re looking at various types of biometrics and one of things that everybody is looking at is iris detection.”

Rhee stated that advanced biometrics would probably first appear in high-end devices, but would eventually be made available in entry-level models. Through introducing features such as iris detection, Samsung is attempting to attract more business consumers to use its Knox platform.

Samsung Knox provides security features that enable business and personal content to coexist on the same handset. In its current version, user press an icon that switches personal to work profiles immediately, with no delay or reboot wait time. Samsung has claimed this feature will be fully compatible with Android and Google and will provide a full separation of work and personal data on mobile devices and address all major security gaps in Android. Rhee is currently in charge of Samsung Knox project development. He has previously provided keynote commentary on the Knox security platform.

According to Rhee, both healthcare and the financial sectors are taking advantage of Knox. However, Samsung wants wider penetration of paid Knox subscribers. While the mobile security platform is embedded on 87 million devices, only 1.8 million users have actively deployed the system for regular use. The implementation of iris recognition in Samsung mobile products might increase Knox usage.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  iris recognition  |  mobile  |  Samsung  |  sensors  |  smartphone