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Android's Cell Phone Lock: Cool or Pain in the ---?
by Kevin Maney
Oct 13, 2008
Oct 13, 2008
Kevin Maney wonders: Kudos for Google for trying to come up with a simple but more secure way for cell phone owners to lock and unlock their phones. The new system, shown in this TechCrunch post, uses nine dots in the same pattern as a phone keypad, but the dots are not numbered. Instead of creating a numbered PIN for the phone, you create a four-dot pattern. I guess that might be easier for users to remember, and harder for an onlooker to steal -- although I'm not entirely sure about either.
One problem, I bet, is that most people create PINs based on something in their past experience -- like an old work phone number or a grandparent's birthday. That makes them easier to remember. We don't really have past experiences with four-dot patterns. Will that lead to more people forgetting their PINs?
Sooner or later, there's got to be a better way. Lenovo offers laptops that can use face recognition for security. Can't cell phones be made to do that? It only unlocks if the camera sees that it's you. Cell phones have been made with fingerprint readers, but those haven't caught on in the US.
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