Samsung Galaxy S8 to Reportedly Offer Facial Recognition

With just a few weeks to go before the official unveiling of Samsung's next flagship Galaxy S8 smartphone, leaks and rumours are popping up more than ever. In our previous story we mentioned leaked pricing details for the upcoming devices and now a new batch of rumours suggest the device could feature facial recognition - a rumour that echoes iPhone 8 leaks also anticipating the same feature.

All the leaks and teasers so far have pretty much revealed that the Galaxy S8 will push the fingerprint scanner at the back, leaving the front button-less for a near bezel-less display. To compensate for that, the device was reported to get an iris scanner, much like the Galaxy Note 7. In addition to the iris scanner, it is now being reported by The Investor that the device will feature facial recognition as well.

"Due to some limits of iris scanning such as speed and accuracy, we have decided to add facial recognition to the Galaxy S8," the report quotes a Samsung official as saying. "With a face scanner, it will take less than 0.01 seconds to unlock the phone." What remains to be seen is whether the facial recognition feature will come to both the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ or be exclusive to the latter.

Interestingly, the report comes following a January report on Apple that suggested that the upcoming iPhone 8 will sport facial recognition. Notably, the iPhone 8 is also being tipped to sport a near bezel-less design.

The Galaxy S8 is said to sport a 5.8-inch Quad HD+ Super AMOLED display, which translates to 5.6-inch if counting the rounded corners, while the Galaxy S8+ will sport a 6.2-inch Quad HD+ Super AMOLED display that translates to 6.1-inch with rounded corners.

The Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ are touted to sport Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 835 SoC while variants in some regions are expected to get Exynos 8895 SoC. The flagships will either be launched with 4GB or 6GB of RAM and 64GB inbuilt storage, which is likely to support expandable storage via microSD (up to 128GB). Both the devices will feature 12-megapixel dual-rear cameras and 8-megapixel front-facing camera.

With almost everything right from design down to pricing having been leaked ahead of the launch on March 29, we now have a pretty accurate picture of the Galaxy S8 and you can expect some final details to surface as we approach the launch.