Samsung: Galaxy S5 due by April, maybe with iris scanner

The Korean company's next-generation flagship Android phone will be more distinctive than predecessors. Also coming: a smaller, more powerful Gear successor

 

Samsung's Galaxy S5 will be stylistically distinct from S3 and S4 predecessors, and the next-generation flagship Android phone could include an iris scanner when it ships in March or April, according to the company's mobile-products leader.

"Many people are fanatical about iris recognition technology... We are studying the possibility," said Young-hee Lee, executive vice president of marketing for Samsung mobile's division, in a Bloomberg News interview at the CES conference in Las Vegas published Thursday.

Iris scanners can identify a person based on patterns in the eye, and adding one would be a competitive response to the fingerprint scanner in Apple's iPhone 5S and HTC One Max. For the iris scanner to be more than a gimmick, though, it would have to work effectively to avoid criticisms such as those leveled at the HTC One Max's fingerprint authentication mechanism.

Samsung had planned to include a fingerprint scanner in the Galaxy Note 3, a phablet released in September, but backed off the idea because it wasn't reliable enough, sources have told

The S5 should look different, too: "When we moved to S4 from S3, it's partly true that consumers couldn't really feel much difference between the two products from the physical perspective, so the market reaction wasn't as big," Lee told Bloomberg. "For the S5, we will go back to the basics. Mostly, it's about the display and the feel of the cover."