Galaxy Nexus: Ice Cream Sandwich Face Unlock Tech Revealed

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There’s been a ton of features about the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich revealed during Google and Samsung’s event today, but one of the more interesting features we saw was Ice Cream Sandwich’s new face unlock technology… that is, it would have been awesome if Matias Duarte’s demo had gone according to plan.

Basically, the idea is this: why should you have to enter a password every time you want to access your phone? Wouldn’t it just be easier if your phone recognized who you were and unlocked based on who’s looking at the screen? With face unlock, anyone who isn’t you can’t access your phone, but as we saw during Duarte’s demo, it might not recognize you either.

Duarte handed the phone off to his colleague on-stage with him and challenged him to try and unlock the phone, which never happened. So far, so good – but when the phone was handed back to Duarte, it didn’t recognize him, either. “I guess this make-up was a little bit stronger than I thought,” Duarte said when the Galaxy Nexus wouldn’t recognize his smiling mug.

Hey, you can’t win ‘em all, and for what it’s worth, we’re sure that face unlock is going to be a very handy piece of technology once they work the kinks out. Keep it tuned here to TFTS for more news from Google and Samsung‘s Galaxy Nexus event!