Mobile Phone Finger Print Scanner

[Trebek]

I suppose someone may have already thought of this idea but what the hey, I have never seen it on ANY phone so far and I look at phones a lot!

My idea is to have the now very common fingerprint scanners that are in laptops embedded into new phones for enhanced security. There would be a program on the phone to control how this hardware works and I’d imagine that you could set it up in a variety of ways such as:

Have the device ALWAYS lock itself when you lock the keypad.
This would totally lock the whole phone and no one could access your phone or any application without your finger print.

Have the device NEVER lock itself but have selected applications locked.
This would be controlled by the phone application and you would select any application in the phone to be "protected" or "locked". This way, if you JUST wanted the Calendar application locked but everything else normal and unlocked it wouldn't be a problem.

I can see that this would also be very handy in business places where they use the Nokia business style phones like the E71 or the ever popular Blackberries. These often contain full Exchange integration and would greatly benefit from a finger print locking system. What happens if the major CEO of a company looses their phone that’s fully tied into the businesses systems? Sure they can bar the phone from the exchange server, however there still may be very valuable data on the phone that would otherwise be accessible by the thief. Also, they might not get time to ban the phone if the thief is quick enough. A simple finger print reader would add that extra layer of security that so many businesses pay a good deal of money for these days.

The thing that made me think of this is that we use our phones for so much more today and want to store EVERYTHING in them. Our calendars, contacts, addresses, etc but there’s never any security to go with them. There are a few limited programs out there that let you have a password protected Notes style area, but never anything built directly into the phones and out of the box.

[Trebek]

After submitting this idea to Nokia in email form, they have responded with the following:

Nokia is prepared to make a preliminary review of your idea on a non-confidential and non-binding basis

Obviously nothing is set in stone as of yet but it's a good start to know their at least interested. After printing out my idea its on it's way to Nokia in Finland in real live mail form (that is all they accept). Hopefully with any luck they may start to process the idea for real and you'll be seeing this in a business device sooner rather than later