LG sneers at fingerprint sensors. While Samsung, Apple, and HTC all tilt at biometric windmills, LG has a different way into the heart of your phone: by tapping at its screen.
The company's Knock Code, currently expanding across its product line, is LG's solution to mobile security issues and to waking up your phone without touching the power button. Soon, it may be used as a shortcut to various applications. And none of that requires a fingerprint sensor, the company says.
"To unlock your phone with a fingerprint, you have to do the operation where the sensor is," LG's Ian Hwang said. "So you have to find it first, and it adds bezel. Our Knock Code works anywhere on the screen. [Furthermore] some people have skin problems; fingerprint sensors may not work very well for some people. Knock Code works for everybody."
To use Knock Code, you tap a sequence of locations on your phone's unlit screen. They could be spread all over the screen, or in one corner. According to Hang-shin Cho from LG Mobile Product Planning and Development, who helped develop Knock Code, LG requests touch screens that have a low-power mode. The touch sensor caches taps and touches, and wakes up the phone if it receives a sequence that might be a code.
Security is the app's first purpose, Hwang said. LG's studies showed that more than 60 percent of people don't lock their smartphone, and that among those, 30 percent had had some personal data stolen or viewed by an unauthorized party.
"People just don't lock their phones because it's too much of a hassle to unlock every time we check them. People check their smartphone a lot of times a day, maybe more than 100 times," Hwang said.
For the G2, a phone with the power button on the back, LG developed "Knock On," which lets you tap on the screen to wake it up. That didn't require much more programming to turn into the more secure Knock Code, Hwang said.
It took a lot of study, though: LG called in 400 testers to try Knock Code in more than 100 situations, with different finger sizes, one-handed and two-handed use, to make sure that they could all tap the squares without running into problems.
What's next? If you like patterns, they're going to put some more patterns in your patterns as Knock Code may be used to launch specific apps. LG is studying waking up Web browsers and IM programs with a tap, for instance. And you'll see it on more phones.
"Our plan is to expand the experience to all the lower-end phones as well," Hwang said.