Future of mobiles

This morning I woke up to a number of articles posted in my inbox. Most where related to the Mobile Conference being held in Barcelona.  One of them got my attention. It talks about fingerprint scanners can be hidden in something small such as the volume rocker in a mobile phone. 

The company in question is a well known company in this area and has been around for quite some time now. 

The concept of being able to integrate a device in such a small area and accurately authenticating someone on that partial finger print made me think of a very (possibly futuristic) interesting concept. 

Imagine a mobile where you do not need a password, fingerprint scanners, voice or face scanning to access its contents. What if the whole mobile was a fingerprint scanner and when you grabbed your mobile, based on a number of partial fingerprint and palm print (whatever touches the mobile surface), provided you access to the mobile. Hand the mobile over to someone else and they would not be able to access it. Grab the mobile back in your hands and access is granted. 

There are companies who are using similar concepts albeit at a different level (such as the gun industry), with varying levels of success or take up. 

There are obvious issues to this technology such as when you have to hand over your phone to someone to do a call. This can easily be solved by having an icon or a button which when clicked allows temporary access for a period of time or for the duration of a call or similar.

There are also ethical issues with people accessing your data while you are unconscious or similar. Well the technology exists to cover for this as well.. with all fitness trackers available and hand heat sensors , the technology to detect the level of consciousness of a person is an easy fix.

Another aspect which was very interesting was on an unrelated article where a study performed on how mobile users grab their phone, tap on the screen, and the speed at which they perform their tasks, builds up a pattern of usage which can determine if the person using the device is the "normal" owner of the device with an accuracy of over 98%, after only a week of typical usage. This means that the way we make use of these devices is very unique and each person has a distinct usage pattern. 

Mobiles will continue to evolve and it is just a matter of time till we have such devices at hand (unless other forms of authentication take on quicker).

Let us see if a company picks up this idea and rolls with it !