Tag: Smart Phones

Fooling The Samsung Galaxy S10 Ultrasonic Fingerprint Scanner

Someone has put up a post on imgur claiming to demonstrate unlocking a Galaxy S10 by 3d printing a fingerprint based on an image of the fingerprint,

First I simply took a photograph of my fingerprint on the side of a wine glass. I used my smartphone to take this picture, but it’s certainly not out of the question to use a long focal length DSLR camera to snag a fingerprint image from across a room…or further.

I then pulled the image into Photoshop and increased the contrast, and created an alpha mask.

I exported that over to 3ds Max and created a geometry displacement from the Photoshop image which gave me a raised 3d model of every last detail of the fingerprint.

I popped that model into the 3D printing software and began to print it. This was printed using an AnyCubic Photon LCD resin printer, which is accurate down to about 10 microns (in Z height, 45 microns in x/y), which is more than enough detail to capture all of the ridges in a fingerprint.

As the author of the post notes, if a smartphone is stolen, it is likely that a fingerprint of the owner will be found on the phone itself (especially if the user is repeatedly touching a specific area of the screen to unlock it, as someone using the ultrasonic fingerprint reader would be doing).

LG Teases New G6 Feature: Phone Won’t Be Poorly Made Crap

This Android Central story made me laugh out loud. LG’s phones have a history of poor workmanship, suffering from hardware and software problems that cause things like bootloops (where a phone simply reboots forever). As Android Central notes, the G4, G5, V10, and V20 all had bootloop problems. I had to return my LG G5 during the warranty period because it just started bootlooping while I was walking around one day.

So in one of its announcements for the G6, LG is claiming that it is finally going to make a reliable phone. Oh, well, that’s cool I guess. So you’re finally going to devote some efforts to quality control with this phone? Well, isn’t that special!

 

Galaxy S7 Edge Injustice Variant

This Batman-themed Galaxy S7 Edge is the only time I’ve ever been tempted to buy one of these pop culture-branded variants of a smart phone. Fortunately, it looks doubtful that this will make it to the US (last year’s Iron Man-themed S6 Edge was only available in Hong Kong, China and South Korea, and it looks like this phone will have a similarly limited release).

 

Galaxy S7 Edge Injustice Variant

Kingmax’s 64gb Micro SDXC Card

Taiwan-based Kingmax issued a press release in May claiming to unveil the largest Micro SDXC card yet at 64gb.

Of course this is just a press announcement, so Kingmax 64gb Micro SDXC cards aren’t actually on sale anywhere in the world yet. And no pricing has been given. But, hey — there’s a press release, right? Good luck storing any data on that!

The obvious application for these is in smart phones. These cards are the same form factor as Micro SD cards, but the spec current generation of Micro SD cards are based on arbitrarily limits their size to 32gb. Eventually, though, smart phone manufacturers are going to start adding SDXC compatibility — the Thunderbolt was originally rumored to have SDXC, but shipped with plain old SD. There are already companies offering exFAT (the file system used by SDXC) solutions for Android.

The cool thing is just how much data is ultimately going to be available locally on handheld devices. When you’ve got a phone 5 years from now that has 128-256 gb of data storage on it plus pervasive 4G access plus grapics rivaling today’s console systems, you’ve got people using their phones for things we can’t even imagine today (and one thing Android better get working on pretty damn quick is encryption across the device).