Galaxy S5 fingerprint scanner and heart rate monitor explained
Mobile
Hello.
I'm Luke Westaway for CNET here with the Samsung Galaxy S5.
Now Samsung has put some interesting new hardware onto its fifth Galaxy S smartphone.
It has a fingerprint scanner on the front and a heart rate monitor on the back.
We're gonna take a closer look at these two new bits of tech.
Let's start with the fingerprint scanner.
Now, obviously, there's one of this already on the iPhone 5S, but there's some applications here that you don't get on an Apple phone.
Apart from using this fingerprint
scanner to make payments, you can also use it to restrict access to certain files on the phone using an application called Private Mode.
When Private Mode is activated, you can go through and select photos, music, particular media files and you can tag them as only being accessible in Private Mode, and that means they won't be viewable unless you give that fingerprint swipe.
In our testing, we found the scanner didn't always work and sometimes we have to try two or three times before it would recognize our print,
maybe it will just take some getting used to.
Next up, what about the heart rate scanner?
Well, Samsung wants you to use this to track your exercise.
Now the way it works is it shines a red light through your finger and that actually measures your pulse so it knows how fast your heart is beating.
It works in conjunction with Samsung's S Health app.
If I fire this up, you can see it's telling me to place my finger on the sensor and it gives me my heart rate
in bpm.
If you want, you can see your progress on a graph like this.
Now at the moment, it seems this only really works with S Health, but I'm wondering if other apps could start to use it in the future.
The fingerprint scanner and the heart rate monitor are the two most interesting bits of new hardware on the Galaxy S5, but are they enough to tempt you to buy?
Why don't you let us know?
I'm Luke Westaway for CNET at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Check out CNET.com for much more.
