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Android 12's face-based screen rotation is perfect for bedtime doomscrolling
Where was this feature during all of 2020?
Android 12 is shaping up to be all about the new Material You redesign and theming system. It's a hot look, but it's not all we're getting, and one of the cooler features to land in yesterday's release is the new face-based autorotation for the Pixel 4 and later. Once enabled, it harnesses not just the angle of your phone relative to the ground, but also your face's orientation. That means it considers how you're looking at your phone, not just what the accelerometer says, making it perfect for a bit of bedtime doomscrolling in portrait.
While governments worldwide are starting to add facial recognition software to public cameras, Facebook has settled its long-term legal dispute concerning its use of this technology to tag people in photos uploaded to its platform. The company has agreed to pay $550 million to a group of plaintiffs from Illinois who argued the network didn't seek their consent when it first started the practice in 2011.
When the details about the pop-up camera for the OnePlus 7 Pro first started to leak out, our first concern was how that might affect the company's Face Unlock. The feature is among the fastest of its type when it comes to unlocking your device. Even if its security is doubtful, it's quite a convenience, and the extra lag imposed by the pop-up camera could have been a dealbreaker. We're happy to report that it's still very fast, though it is a bit awkward.
Samsung's latest Galaxy S10 might be our favorite phone right now, but you might want to be a little bit careful when it comes to setting up lockscreen security on it. Right now, you can fool it with a video of yourself played back on another phone, or even just a photo. In at least one case, even siblings have been able to trick it.
So in some good news, it looks like Chrome OS will get face recognition in the future for upcoming Chromebooks. If you use Google's desktop OS, then you know how frustrating logging in can be, even with the PIN or phone Smart Lock systems, so this will hopefully address that inconvenience.
Hot on the heels of the Pixel update earlier today, Verizon is also rolling out an update for Galaxy S8 and S8+ devices on the network. Don't get too excited, it's still just Android 7.0 Nougat. But, you do get a pile of bug fixes and improvements like an option for faster face recognition, navigation bar tweaks, and fixes for things like VPNs, car Bluetooth, and alarms.