It is not long until the Samsung Galaxy S8 is released upon the world and as such has other manufacturers clambering to bring enhancements to their devices that will hopefully help them remain competitive with Samsung. LG are one that have recently released a new flagship and now apparently want to be able to play the “me-too” game. Rumours out of Korea have now surfaced that point towards LG introducing new security checks for their mobile payment system.
At the moment, the only way to authorise a payment with the LG G6 is the fingerprint scanner whereas the Galaxy S8 will offer not just the finger print scanner but also retinal scanning. To combat this LG are reportedly looking to partner with Korean facial recognition software company Oez to build the software for the G6. Oez’s 3-D facial recognition software, OezFR, has apparently been easy to apply to the LG G5 and V20 and for this reason LG has chosen it.
The footprint of the software is small (<5MB) and has security measures that prevent it from being bypassed with a simple picture. After negotiations and testing the software is expected to be deployed in June when they unveil their new mobile payment system, LG Pay. There is no mention yet whether it will be possible to use the security for Android Pay but we do not see any reason why it couldn’t be implemented for that payment system also.
Whether it ever arrives on our shores is unknown but we would hope that any security improvements would be rolled out to all G6 phones in the wild, no matter where they are. With this playing of catch-up by LG it makes me wonder why they didn’t look to innovate more with the G6. Sure, they have a dual camera and an 18:9 display, but they seem to have stopped short of going all in and making full use of the great hardware with some innovative software.
Hopefully this update arrives on our shores in the future, along with all other updates and upgrades LG decide to make post-release. Our review will be published in the coming days so keep an eye on Ausdroid early next week.
