There’s no doubt that today’s Digital Age has brought some incredible benefits to our society…

• Communication between family and friends is easier and quicker than ever before.
• Our personal affairs are significantly more convenient. Our banking, bill-paying, and investing can all be done online and while on the go.
• It’s revolutionized global business and commerce.
• Access to research and information is at our fingertips whenever we need it.
• Personal information, such as medical records, is more streamlined.
• We can own much more music and film, and easily store it in the cloud.

But such convenience comes at a price.

Namely, from cyber thieves who lurk anonymously in the shadows, looking to crack digital security to steal our information or our identities, or generally foul up our lives in some way by infecting computers and crashing networks.

Fortunately, there’s a virtually fail-safe way to fight back – at least when it comes to something as ubiquitous as our smartphones.

The best form of defense is… yourself!

Take a look…

The Eyes Have It

In recent years, we’ve seen some significant advances in biometric technology when it comes to our personal devices.

Take the more recent iPhones, for example, which now incorporate a fingerprint sensor that you can use to unlock the phone.

(By the way, this was something we predicted way back in February 2013.)

Well, Japanese communications and mobile phone firm Fujitsu (FJTSY) has just taken mobile biometrics a step further with the ARROWS NX F-04G.

Together with telecom carrier NTT DOCOMO (DCM), the just-released phone is the first in the world to feature iris recognition technology.

Yep… just look at the screen, and the “Iris Passport” system will identify your eye in about one second and unlock the phone. The iris-scanning feature can also be used to make mobile payments on the phone.

In a dark area? No problem. The ARROWS NX F-04G is equipped with infrared lights to illuminate the eye and allow recognition.

Not only that, the technology is so smart that it actually “learns” the individual features of a user’s eye over time. So if it weren’t already very difficult to fake someone’s eye, the recognition becomes even more accurate over time.

Take a look…

Tech Giants Beaten to the Punch

In short, the once-cool fingerprint-scanning technology on the iPhone and Samsung’s (SSNLF) Galaxy S6 has been supplanted by something cooler.

But it seems only a matter of time before they both incorporate similar technology into their phones, too. Indeed, according to Android Authority, Samsung is working with SRI International on adding iris scanning to its devices. Its “Iris on the Move” technology is set to feature in the new Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4. If successful, and scalable, iris scanning could potentially appear in a future Galaxy S7 phone.

For now, however – and for once – both Apple and Samsung have suffered a rare loss to another tech rival.

Cheers,

Martin Denholm