iPhone 5S To Ring In The New With Expected Fingerprint Sensing Home Button
Tuesday will tell, but multiple rumors are pointing to a subtle design distinction for the forthcoming iPhone 5S. Along with new Gold and Graphite colors, the home button is expected have a new look signifying the inclusion of a fingerprint scanner within.
FOX News anchor (and now app developer) Clayton Morris first claimed, in an interview last month, that “sources” told him that the home button will “have a silver ring around it.” Speculation was raised by the inclusion in the invitation for Tuesday’s announcement of three silver-bordered rings along with the brightly-colored circles reminiscent of the iOS 7′s new palette. (I have inserted iPhone 5 home buttons into those rings in the spoof on Apple AAPL +0.61%‘s invitation above.) The features is also shown on questionable “leaked” photos of 5S packaging, but these could have been generated in response to Clayton as opposed to anything Apple is actually doing.
Additionally, Sonny Dickson released high-resolution photos on Friday of a sensor purported to be attached to the new home button, but there has need no independent corroboration of the actual functionality of the leaked part.
Most accounts have indicated that initially the sensor will be able to authenticate a user on the device, as the lock screen passcode does now, but not yet be capable of secure payments. The payment piece will obviously be a really big deal, and many companies are pursuing that grail, but fingerprint authentication, if it works reliably, will be a big boon to Apple in winning over enterprise IT departments.
Wells Fargo WFC -0.93% analyst and AllThingsD contributor Maynard Um, quoted this morning in USA Today, says that, “Enterprises want to know devices are in the right hands, and this pretty much guarantees it. [the inclusion of a fingerprint scanner] addresses enterprise security issues for Apple and will open up that market to the company more.” Um is bullish on the new technology that Apple bought from Authentec, and on Thursday he raised his price range estimate for Apple by almost 10% (from $485-$525 to $525-$575) in advance of the 5S release.
“Everyone is looking at what this new phone can do, and one of the key things is fingerprint authentication,” Um told USA Today. “People are underestimating what this technology can do.” Indeed, the authentication feature has been the one genuinely new aspect of the 5S that has surfaced, leading me to speculate that the “S” will stand for “security.” In combination with iOS 7′s iCloud Keychain, the fingerprint scanner could make the use of the new iPhones both more spontaneous and more secure.
Sebastien Taveau, the CTO of Validity Sensors, one of Authentec’s major competitors, reminds us in the USA Today article that, ”The swipe and PIN was one of the things Steve Jobs hated. It was in the way of the user experience.” This could be the biggest post-Jobs improvement in user experience undertaken by Apple under Tim Cook, and its success (or failure) will tell us a lot about the future viability of the company’s ability to innovate.
Apple will not be alone, particularly in the pursuit of biometric authentication for payments. PayPal president David Marcus predicts that, ”Within the next two years the vast majority of high-end smartphones will have biometrics and mainly fingerprint logins. It’s going to be very useful for payments.” PayPal is partners with Google GOOG +0.02%, BlackBerry, Lenovo and Validity Sensors in the FIDO Alliance (Fast Identity Online) a trade group that is charged with developing open standards for biometric alternatives to passwords and PINs. Apple, you will notice, is not a member of that group, indicating it intends to go its own way with this technology.
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