It's interesting how Apple is moving away from being the first phone with a feature (face id, Samsung did that before, or oled displays that are edge to edge). I think the shift from that innovation is a maturing step, but also a sign that the company is aging poorly. They can no longer claim to be leading with creation, just with quality. More and more the focus in smartphone development, not just Apple, is on being the best of what currently exists instead of actually bringing groundbreaking technology to the table.
For Samsung, nope. You can just open someone's profile picture on Facebook on your phone and show it to their phone and It'll unlock (or not, just like with their actual face).
Samsung didn't do face unlock first either, it was part of Android 4.0. Of course, using a single camera without movement you'll only get 2d data, so it shouldn't stand a chance against Apple's 3d sensor.
No, they didn't. What Samsung did was release software that mimicked facial recognition. In fact, it mimicked it so well, people were convinced that Samsung did it first. What Samsung actually did was implement software that would sometimes coincidentally "recognize" a face, and more often would "recognize" a photo of the target user. What Samsung didn't do was implement facial recognition that was reliable and secure, which I think is what most people think of when they think "facial recognition".
This raises a major question though - what's the use case and threat model for facial recognition? If you're remotely concerned about security, clearly you're not going to use it. If you only care about preventing the casual attacker, either option seems good enough.
I just don't see a security model in which Apple has substantially improved it. The security of it is terrible in either case - all Apple did was make it more expensive.
> What Samsung actually did was implement software that would sometimes coincidentally "recognize" a face, and more often would "recognize" a photo of the target user
No way unique to Samsung. Every implementation I've seen fails at this, even the latest one in Windows 10.
If you care about security, don't use it. That's my advice.
I think it was reported here that Samsung just stored a jpeg of your face on the local file system and did a simple compare. But sure, they get to claim being first. I suspect Apple is okay with that.
Google had face unlock back in 2011 when the Galaxy Nexus came out but I'm not going to pretend it was anything like this. It worked alright but had plenty of warnings saying it wasn't perfect and that someone that looked like you could unlock your phone. I always found it quite cumbersome to use because it turns out my natural way of holding my phone doesn't point the front camera directly at my face. I hope for the sake of iPhone X users that that isn't true for FaceID and that the sensors are wide angle enough that it isn't as annoying to use as Face Unlock is.
As others have said, the Samsung face unlock was not secure. Windows Hello has been around a while though and I think it works similarly to how the iphone one works.
Yes I will concede that the original iPhone was a game changer in terms of new features. However once smartphone competition picked up Apple (rightly, in my mind) mostly sat back and refined features others had tried before.
Ok, what consumer device had capacitive touch before the iPhone. You just gotta name one! I'm pretty tired of these smug ignorant attitudes, this isn't reddit.
Also, I stated capacitive, not multitouch, if that is meant a strawman.
If you're simply looking for capacitive touch in a consumer environment, then there are a great many. Simple capacitive touch sensors to replace physical push-buttons were widely seen in the 80s, I remember using them on elevators, and built one myself as a child.
Capacitive touch sensors that registered an X/Y position rather than a simple on/off state were also common in laptop touchpads from around the mid to late 90s. The iPod introduced a capacitive touch wheel to replace the click wheel in their second-generation model, released in 2002.
There were various capacitive touchscreen display devices around before the iPhone, but probably the most relevant to your query (and one of the most well-known, due to its similarity to the first iPhone's technology) was the LG Prada, a phone with a capacitive touch-screen announced about 6 months before the iPhone.
The thing with the iPhone's touchscreen wasn't that the technology was particularly revolutionary -- sure, if you combine enough words together, then you can make the argument that the iPhone was probably the first mass-consumed capacitive multi-touch hand-held consumer device, but you can remove any of those words and it was no longer the first. The revolutionary aspect of the iPhone was, in my opinion, the software that allowed the device to be controlled with the relative imprecision of a finger, rather than a stylus. The actual hardware to process the touch inputs was at best evolutionary, not revolutionary.
I stand corrected. The Prada predates the iPhone by 6 months with capacitive single touch screen. I guess I got angry in my hasty reply; it was a combination of things.
FingerWorks? Looks like they had a bunch of multitouch products starting in 1998. Probably not coincidentally, their technology was acquired by Apple in 2005.
How many iPhone X will sell this month and how many Samsung phones sold the 1st month they released edge to edge displays? I think part of Apple's problem is success, they have to launch with a profitable phone the 1st month; no delays & no defects. Samsung can have a higher internal scrap rate for the 1st few months because they sell less and it impacts the bottom line less.
I actually thought they were always of the opinion that they will only lead when they feel like they can make it a good experience or that the tech is finished or mature enough.
Samsung's face recognition software was hacked from day one. Not only did, it was hacked with a 2D picture, something that was also shown possible since 2011, when Google first introduced face recognition. It's like Samsung didn't even bother to improve it at all.
Being first with a crappy solution is not exactly ideal, either. We'll see if Apple's solution is that much better - I don't really trust any face recognition tech, but the 1:1,000,000 FAR ratio vs 1:50,000 for fingerprint looks promising at least.
> Apple Computer widely popularized the computer-based cut/copy-and-paste paradigm through the Lisa (1983) and Macintosh (1984) operating systems and applications.
