A New Way to Protect Your Smartphone?

    Mobile technology is becoming more and more sophisticated as the years go on. Heck, every few months there is a new phone with brand new features or more sophisticated features than the last one and then people have to have these phones. So what is the latest and greatest feature for smartphones nowadays? A new feature as face and voice verification is now being tested at the University of Manchester and being tested on a new Nokia phone. How will this be helpful and useful to the public? Or is this just something that is completely unnecessary and something to hype up the technology being used in cellphones?
    As always the new technology that scientists come up with is to try and be beneficial to the public. Why else would you come up with a new feature, application or idea? The idea of facial and voice recognition technology is already in use with other types of technology out there in the world. It is used with laptops, the new Xbox Kinect, webcams and more. It is a great security feature to have on a phone because than if you lost your mobile phone noone would be able to hack into it (in theory because we always know there is going to be a person where if they try hard enough they can find a way to accomplish a task). But, anyway, the point is that this can be very beneficial and helpful to those that lose or misplace a phone. At the same time, how much more will you as a customer have to pay for this type of a feature on your smartphone? Is it really worth it? 
  How the feature works is that there is a camera used to scan your face and is able to identify where you are as in a location of the area. There has been preliminary research and tests on this kind of a feature. " 'Existing mobile face trackers give only an approximate position and scale of the face,' said Dr Phil Tresadern, lead researcher on the project. 'Our model runs in real-time and accurately tracks a number of landmarks on and around the face such as the eyes, nose, mouth and jaw line.' " (University of Manchester). Obviously, they want to expand the project and research and they have a plan for this because it has been 20 years in the making.
      The future plan for this feature being used in mobile technology becomes more complex than what already exists on pre-existing technologies such as the ones mentioned before (laptops, webcams, etc). "Eventually it will be able to tell who the user is, where they are looking and even how they are feeling." (University of Manchester). What they also want to do is also be able to eliminate the use of PIN numbers and passwords to have to log into features such as the internet and other applications that might require these things. It really is a great feature to apply to mobile phones because it can enhance the security of it so much and save people from having to remember several different passwords and then have to save said passwords into the phone where a person could easily find them on the phone and thus that person loses their privacy and security on their mobile phone. 

Photo Credit goes to this website:
http://www.itp.net/564263-alliance-sees-improved-cellphone-security-in-saudi

If you're interested in reading the article I'm going to post the link below:
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2010/10/26/new.software.brings.facial.recognition.technology.mobile.phones