Intelligent Scan (Galaxy S9) vs Face ID (iPhone X) (Video)

Now that the iPhone X started to make face unlock a bit more mainstream other manufacturers are all getting on board with, not adding facial unlocking, which most have had for some time, but with marketing the feature upfront now and coming up with better ways of implementing it.

Samsung recently launched their Galaxy S9 and S9+ and with it “Intelligent Scan” which isn’t so much a new tech as it is a combination of their existing Iris Scan (which scans your eyes for authentication) and then defaults to their facial recognition if that isn’t available–all within milliseconds.

But, as I generally do, I wanted to see how they’d do head to head, or face to face, I guess. So here we go. I’ve setup both devices to recognize my face right now so there is no discrepancies of that I look slightly different from when I original set them up, etc. and I’m going to see how fast each unlocks. I did it one at a time to give the phone my direct attention so angle isn’t an issue either and then we’ll line it up and slow it down in post and see how they do in different scenarios.

Overall, both had a much harder time in the dark, but the iPhone X was a bit faster in all of them and especially faster in the dark. Considering the iPhone X has a lot more hardware dedicated to facial recognition and tracking, it’s really not a big surprise, but I have to give the S9+ credit for being able to do as well as it did without all that extra equipment.