You could unlock Samsung phones with photographs [1]
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-galaxy-note-8-facial-...
Lifting a working fingerprint and transferring it to a play-doh mold or a hi-res printer is a whole another beast.
No, they didn't. What Samsung did was release software that mimicked facial recognition. In fact, it mimicked it so well, people were convinced that Samsung did it first. What Samsung actually did was implement software that would sometimes coincidentally "recognize" a face, and more often would "recognize" a photo of the target user. What Samsung didn't do was implement facial recognition that was reliable and secure, which I think is what most people think of when they think "facial recognition".
No way unique to Samsung. Every implementation I've seen fails at this, even the latest one in Windows 10.
If you care about security, don't use it. That's my advice.
I just don't see a security model in which Apple has substantially improved it. The security of it is terrible in either case - all Apple did was make it more expensive.
Apple has always done a good job of really refining features, but I'm not certain I can think of one that they were first on.
Also, I stated capacitive, not multitouch, if that is meant a strawman.
Neonode N1 had a different kind of touch screen (not resistive), but share a lot of features with the iPhone as well.
"I didn't mention multitouch, answer my question!"
"Oh, you're right. But it didn't have multitouch!"
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Capacitive touch sensors that registered an X/Y position rather than a simple on/off state were also common in laptop touchpads from around the mid to late 90s. The iPod introduced a capacitive touch wheel to replace the click wheel in their second-generation model, released in 2002.
There were various capacitive touchscreen display devices around before the iPhone, but probably the most relevant to your query (and one of the most well-known, due to its similarity to the first iPhone's technology) was the LG Prada, a phone with a capacitive touch-screen announced about 6 months before the iPhone.
The thing with the iPhone's touchscreen wasn't that the technology was particularly revolutionary -- sure, if you combine enough words together, then you can make the argument that the iPhone was probably the first mass-consumed capacitive multi-touch hand-held consumer device, but you can remove any of those words and it was no longer the first. The revolutionary aspect of the iPhone was, in my opinion, the software that allowed the device to be controlled with the relative imprecision of a finger, rather than a stylus. The actual hardware to process the touch inputs was at best evolutionary, not revolutionary.
They've survived both in the past.
"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." [1]
[1] https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
Being first with a crappy solution is not exactly ideal, either. We'll see if Apple's solution is that much better - I don't really trust any face recognition tech, but the 1:1,000,000 FAR ratio vs 1:50,000 for fingerprint looks promising at least.
Not even copy and paste.
(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut%2C_copy%2C_and_paste)