2015 promises to carry on where the previous calendar year left off, which will hopefully see some of the world’s biggest companies introduce a range of technologically innovative hardware that will not only delight us as consumers, but also make our day-to-day lives easier. 2014 was all about the introduction of intelligent wearable devices, as well as blending biometric detection with existing consumer tech, which looks to not only continue but also dramatically move forward this year if this promotional video for the ViewSonic V55 smartphone is anything to go by.
Apple was the first company to bring biometric smartphone unlocking to the mainstream market. The introduction of the iPhone 5s at the back-end of 2013 contained the powerful Touch ID fingerprint scanner allowing for user authentication with a simple finger hold. As you might imagine, plenty of competing companies followed Apple’s lead in 2014, releasing devices of their own containing fingerprint recognition technology. With that in mind, this excellent promotional video for the ViewSonic V55 could actually be the first introduction of the maiden smartphone to hit the market with an extremely powerful iris scanner built into it.
The ViewSonic hardware was originally given a 2014 release date, which has subsequently been pushed back to “early 2015“. Who knows, maybe we’ll see the V55 and the Apple Watch hitting the market together. Stranger things have indeed happened.
The promotional video does a good job of giving us an initial look at the powerful smartphone, featuring a 13-megapixel Sony-made rear camera and a purported 5.5-inch 1080p display, but it also introduces us to an iris detecting scanner hidden by a sliding panel on the rear of the device.
ViewSonic has made it clear that the iris scanner on the V55 could be used for way more than simple authentication to provide access to the phone and its contents. If ViewSonic, or a competing company, does manage to build this type of technology into a commercially available smartphone then it could be the most secure device of its type on the market.
We’ve all learned from our favorite science fiction movies that eyeballs are a lot harder to replicate and copy than a simple fingerprint, meaning cyber criminals may have a highly reduced chance of gaining malicious access to the smartphone.
If early 2015 does introduce an iris scanning capable phone with a 1080p display, 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 1.4 GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, and ample internal storage, would you be all over it or give it the wide berth for more commercially successful devices like the iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S series?
(Source: GizmoChina)
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