The P903i Secure Phone

• Thursday November 2, 2006 in: Toys For The Boys Tag(s):

  Technorati Tags: gadgets , mobile phones

  Japanese mobile phone carrier NTT DoCoMo just gave new meaning to the words, "secure phone" with its launching of the P903i mobile phone.

  Just what can this mobile phone do? ABC News gives us the skinny on the P903i:

  A new mobile phone in Japan takes security pretty seriously: It can recognize its owner, automatically locks when the person gets too far away from it and can be found via satellite navigation if it goes missing.

  That sounds sweet enough, but how exactly does this thing work?

  Owners must first take at least three photos of themselves with the phone's camera. Up to 10 can be shot, in various situations with and without glasses, with and without makeup, indoors and outdoors.

  Then, if the facial-recognition feature is turned on, before accessing the handset a user has to take a picture of himself with the camera. The phone analyzes features such as distance between the eyes and unlocks if the image matches the stored data.

  A separate function recognizes whether the eyes are blinking in case someone tries to show the owner's photo to gain fraudulent entry. Not only that, a four-letter password can be added to this process, to guard against an identical twin getting unauthorized access.

  This is absolutely cool stuff, but its actual performance remains to be seen, especially in today's world where something as high-tech as that is almost always accompanied by glitches. But one thing's for certain: with its face-recognition features, P903i owners will find getting some facial plastic surgery done difficult, unless they want to switch phones.