Fingerprint sensors are a nifty way to unlock smartphones. Unfortunately, they can also be tricked with a forged print, as was shown with the iPhone 5s and iPhone 6. But a new technology developed in California could change that. A team led by David Horsley, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Davis, has developed a new ultra-safe, ultrasonic sensor. "Our ultrasonic fingerprint sensors have the ability to measure a three-dimensional, volumetric image of the finger surface and the tissues beneath the surface – making fingerprint sensors more robust and secure," says Horsley.
The sensor uses similar technology to medical ultrasound imagers. Transducers on the tiny sensor’s surface send out ultrasound pulses, which bounce off the fingerprint’s ridges and valleys before returning to the transducers. Using ultrasound means that the sensor can penetrate a thin layer of tissue near the finger’s surface, making the technology much more difficult to trick. The chip itself is made from two wafers bonded together: a ‘complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor’ (CMOS) wafer and a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) wafer. The CMOS wafer contains the circuitry for processing the signals, while the MEMS wafer contains the transducers. Besides the security advantages, the researchers say that these chips will be extremely cheap to make. “We were able to use low-cost, high-volume manufacturing processes that produce hundreds of millions of MEMS sensors for consumer electronics each year,” says Horsley. So look out for these sensors on a smartphone near you…
Apple appears to be planning to enable its Apple Pay iPhone mobile payments service in the United Kingdom on July 14th, according to sources at multiple retailers. Apple has informed some Apple Retail employees in the U.K. that Apple Pay support will go live on that Tuesday, while an internal memos for supermarket Waitrose plus an additional retail partner indicate the same date…Apple will also begin training its U.K staff on supporting Apple Pay on July 12th. Apple has begun enabling its mobile point of sale systems in England-based stores to take NFC payments and has been preparing materials to promote the Apple Pay launch in stores. It is plausible that different stores will have different launch dates, but the presence of the same, at least tentative, date makes July 14th a very possible widespread start date.
Announced for July at the June Worldwide Developers Conference, the U.K.’s Apple Pay launch will mark Apple’s first expansion of the service outside of the United States. Like in the U.S., a PIN won’t be required for usage, but the launch will include a £20 cap per transaction, as also noted on the above memo sent to us and posted across the web. However, a source tells us that U.K. systems will be updated in the fall to process higher values. Apple is also currently working on bringing the service to Canada later this year in addition to China and South Korea in the future.
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It's a bad news for all those who haven’t laid their hands on iPhone but were planning to, as Apple has increased the prices of its entire range of smartphones.
According to media reports, the entire range of iPhones will become costlier by Rs. 2,500 in India. This hike in prices is attributed to the latest budget. With this hike in the Apple smartphones the iPhone 6 will now start at Rs.56,000 instead of Rs.53,500 for the 16GB variant, while the 64GB and 128GB iPhone 6 variants will now be priced at Rs.65,000 and Rs.74,000 respectively.
Not only the new iPhones, there is an impact on the older models of the iPhones. The 8GB iPhone 5c is now priced at Rs.33,500 and the iPhone 5s will now start at Rs.47,000 for the 16GB variant and Rs.51,500 for the 32GB variant.
