Samsung Galaxy S8 Meets Multimodal Expectations

Samsung has officially unveiled its newest flagship smartphones, the Samsung Galaxy S8 and the S8+. And as anticipated, the devices offer multimodal biometric authentication capabilities, supporting fingerprint, iris, and facial recognition.

Two of those modalities have long been expected. Fingerprint scanning is now a standard feature on upper-range contemporary smartphones; and after first trying to attain a pioneering position in mobile iris scanning with its recalled Galaxy Note7 device, Samsung was widely expected to carry the torch to the Galaxy S8. The anticipation of facial recognition, however, is a more recent development, with a Samsung official having recently suggested that the technology was implemented to improve the speed and accuracy of the devices’ user recognition.

It’s also now clear that the fingerprint sensors of the S8 and S8+ are indeed on the rear of each device, allowing the devices’ displays to take up almost the entire front face of each – 5.8″ on the S8 and 6.2″ on the S8+. The full-frontal display has long been an ambition of multiple smartphone makers, and here Samsung has gotten a leg-up over its rival Apple; still, Apple now has the opportunity to pull ahead later if it succeeds in integrating the next iPhone’s fingerprint sensor into the display itself.

Other features of the new devices include an 8MP front camera and 12MP rear camera; a 10nm professor and 1GB-per-second download speeds; UHD Alliance-certified High-Definition Resolution; and wireless charging.