The OnePlus 5T’s Face Unlock Feature is coming to the OnePlus 5

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The OnePlus 5T launched with its fingerprint sensor on the back instead of the front, a radical design departure from its predecessors. Oftentimes the biggest advantage of a front-facing fingerprint sensor is the ability to quickly unlock your device when it is still sitting on a table. However, the OnePlus 5T’s bezel-less design approach meant that the company simply couldn’t fit a fingerprint sensor on the front anymore. To combat this, OnePlus introduced their brand new Face Unlock technology which uses the front-facing camera to analyze 100 identifiers of your face. In our experience, it’s blazingly fast and hard to fool. Unfortunately, it remains an exclusive feature on the OnePlus 5T, but not for long. A recent tweet from Carl Pei, one of the co-founders of OnePlus, confirms that the company is bringing Face Unlock to the OnePlus 5.

Due to popular demand, Face Unlock is coming for the OnePlus 5. Thanks for the feedback, and merry Christmas! 🎅🎄🎁 — Carl Pei (@getpeid) December 24, 2017

It’s unknown when we will see the update which brings the changes. The company has just announced that the official Android Oreo update with OxygenOS 5.0 is rolling out to the OnePlus 5, so it may take time for the Face Unlock feature to be brought over as the company deals with any issues that may crop up with the 8.0 update.

As stated before, the feature utilizes the front-facing camera and doesn’t rely on any special hardware on the device, so it’s no surprise to see the feature make its way over to the OnePlus 5. We can’t imagine it would take very for the update to arrive since leaked builds of OxygenOS 5.0 for the OnePlus 5 had a working Face Unlock feature.

We’re glad to see this feature come to the OnePlus 5 as it shows that OnePlus does listen to feedback, though of course that brings up the question about when the company will allow for better alert slider customization.