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February 25, 2014 12:04 am GMT

Samsungs Dust- And Water Resistant Galaxy S5 Gets Official With Heart Rate Monitor, Fingerprint Scanner

samsung-gs5-featureThe Samsung Galaxy S5 is here, and now we know everything about the 2014 flagship from the Korean smartphone maker. It’s pushing into phablet territory with a 5.1-inch, 1920×1080 display, and it comes with a fingerprint reader on the home button, as well as a heart rate monitor around back near the camera flash. The Galaxy S5 is also dust and water resistant, which may be the most useful new feature to ship on the phone. Samsung’s Android 4.4-powered flagship doesn’t deviate that far from its predecessors in terms of case design, packing the larger screen into a larger chassis but sticking with a plastic (though there is a higher end metal variant) backing, rounded corners and a pill-shaped home button, but the fingerprint scanner and heart-rate sensor are significant hardware additions. The Galaxy S5 also seems to have a significant focus on health and fitness with this update, which could preface a similar move with the next generation of iOS software and hardware. ‘Seeing’ Your Heart Beat On the new Samsung phone, the heart rate monitor will track your pulse and provide that info in S Health 3.0, Samsung’s fitness monitoring app, which already tracks steps taken and calories burnt. An optical heart rate monitor that works with your fingertip also appears on the new Galaxy Gear 2 smartwatches. For those who are curious about the inclusion of such a feature, Withings ships a step counter with a built-in monitor, which adds another dimension to health tracking and can be used in combination with other data to give a clearer picture of overall health. Pay By Finger Swipe The other big new hardware feature here is the fingerprint sensor. Many will no doubt accuse Samsung of copying Apple once again, but the fingerprint sensor here is quite different from Apple’s on the iPhone 5s. It can register three separate fingerprints, and registration takes eight swipes (it’s swipe-based, rather than asking you to hold your fingerprint down as with Apple’s). You can unlock the phone using fingerprint recognition, but also use it to authorize PayPal to make payments online – for anything. That’s much wider-reaching than Apple’s usage of fingerprints, which is limited to unlocking and to finalizing purchases made via iTunes. Since it’s using PayPal, that means this could be used to pay for physical goods at retail, too, which potentially opens up a lot of mobile payments options

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