Another September has descended upon us and so we mark another major Apple keynote event. Today at 10AM PDT, Tim Cook and his team took to the stage in Cupertino, California, to unveil the newest iterations of Apple TV, the iPad and the iPhone along with a brand new wearable operating system for Apple Watch.
While a great deal of attention was heaped on the new iPad and Apple TV, September has always been a time for new iPhones, and today’s Apple Event was no different. Apple unveiled the new iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus, both of which boast incredible processing power courtesy of the A9 chip, always-on motion detection via the M9 chip, and the company’s own brand of force touch which it calls 3D Touch.
Of course, in the realm of mobile ID, smartphones are only as impressive as their biometrics, and the iPhone 6S models both boast the first official upgrade to the Apple Touch ID fingerprint sensor. While the keynote didn’t spend much time detailing the sensor, it was confirmed that the second generation Touch ID is twice as fast as the previous iteration.
Speed and convenience has proven to be a major area of focus in consumer biometric technology, especially since smartphone fingerprint sensors are often used to authenticate mobile wallet transactions, a field in which convenience is a premium. Since Touch ID is an integral component of the Apple Pay mCommerce system, the faster biometric authentication will undoubtedly be welcomed by iPhone users.
No word was said about whether or not the new Touch ID features any sort of liveness detection or an improved algorithm, so it looks like for the third year in a row we will have to rely on reports from hackers on how easy it is to spoof the sensors, just as they did for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 5S before it.
Stay with Mobile ID World throughout the rest of the week as we continue to unpack Apple’s September event and what it means for the future of mobile identity management.
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