Nokia 8 Sirocco, Nokia 7 Plus, Nokia 6 (2018), and Nokia 8 to Receive Face Unlock in 'Coming Months'

Nokia 8 Sirocco, Nokia 7 Plus, Nokia 6 (2018), and last year's Nokia 8 will receive a Face Unlock feature, HMD Global announced in a tweet. While the schedule of the update hasn't been revealed yet, the Finnish company has confirmed that the feature will debut on all the four Nokia models in the "coming months" via an over-the-air (OTA) update. The latest change will bring the existing Nokia smartphones against many other Android handsets that offer software-based facial recognition to take on Apple's Face ID that arrived on the iPhone X last year and uses TrueDepth Camera system alongside software-level algorithms. Notably, the Nokia X6 that debuted in China last month included Face Unlock support out-of-the-box.

"Nokia 8 Sirocco, Nokia 7 Plus, and the new Nokia 6, as well as the Nokia 8, will get FaceUnlock as an OTA update in the coming months," the official Nokia Mobile Twitter account said in response to a query regarding the release of a Face Unlock feature on the Nokia 8. The Face Unlock feature will indeed accompany the existing fingerprint unlocking functionality that uses the built-in sensor on the devices to unlock the screen.

Face Unlock is something fresh for HMD Global, the licensee of the Nokia brand for phones, as it brought the feature to Nokia X6 initially and is now expanding its presence to existing Nokia models. However, similar experiences are already available on a list of Android devices. Companies such as Asus, Huawei, and OnePlus brought the facial recognition functionality to their existing models through software updates. Similarly, vendors including Oppo, Samsung, and Xiaomi recently started offering preloaded face unlock feature on their new handsets.

That said, HMD Global is quite popular for delivering the latest Android experiences on its Nokia models. The Finnish company last month announced that it will deliver Android P, the next major Android update, to all Nokia phones launched so far. Similarly, it released Android P Beta 2 release for Nokia 7 Plus users earlier this week.