Apple's Phil Schiller thinks that Android's facial and iris recognition efforts "stink"

This year’s launch of the iPhone X also included the introduction of Apple’s Face ID. Apple thinks that its facial recognition camera and hardware on the front of the iPhone X are among its biggest technological achievements. However, other Android phones have had facial and iris recognition hardware and software of their own. Samsung, as usual, is the leader in this effort, adding those kinds of features to the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus, along with the more recent Note 8 and the older, and explosion-prone, Note 7.

However, Apple feels that the Face ID features in the iPhone X surpass those made by its competition. In a recent interview with Bright.NL, Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, put the company’s position in very blunt terms. When asked to comment about how smartphone makers, such as Samsung, have similar features to Face ID in their phones, Schiller stated, “They all stink.”

Schiller added that Face ID works on the iPhone X in a way that’s not implemented on rival phones. He stated that Face ID had to work much like Touch ID did for Apple’s earlier iPhones, in that it had to quickly allow people to unlock the iPhone X, let them activate features like Apple Pay and Siri, and have all of that be secure to use. He feels that Face ID is a “very unique implementation” of those kinds of features that has not been duplicated by other phones.

Of course, you can bet that other companies are going to try to duplicate, and in some ways exceed, Apple’s Face ID features. In fact, Huawei claims its upcoming depth-sensing camera system will be able to create a 3D map of a human face that has 300,000 contact points, or about 10 times the amount capable from the iPhone X’s Face ID sensors. Only time will tell if Face ID will be the new hotness in mobile phone security.