Facelock is a curious little security app that just happened to win the Nokia Innovators Hackathon that took place at Nokia World 2010. Now with Nokia World 2011 about to kick off the app has made it onto the Nokia Store as a free download. Check out our Facelock on Nokia N8 review.

The premise of Facelock is quite simple: why have a password when a picture (or a scan of your face in this instance) can speak a 1000 words? It works by taking a photo of your face using the front-facing camera on your Nokia Symbian^3 smartphone. That's why we used it on our Nokia N8 rather than the Nokia X7, as sadly the latter lacks a secondary camera.

Once your face has been scanned you can lock your Nokia and the next time you come to use it, instead of entering a password simply line-up your face with the ghost image of yourself and you're in.

In theory this should work seamlessly and smoothly but you there are a few factors against you. Facelock takes a photo and not a real scan, so unless you have the exact same lighting conditions every time you may find it drops out on occasion.

However, the bigger concern we found was that you need to align the ghost image with your face which is easier said than done. We found it easier than most people by virtue of wearing glasses, as it gives you a fixed point to track, but non-wearers may find themselves waving their Nokia around in front of their face.

If you're worried the face recognition will fail at any time, there is a backdoor into your Nokia smartphone as you can also set up a standard PIN number combination, which feels a bit like cheating but is a decent 'belts and braces' approach to security.

Overall, Facelock works to a degree but it's not quite the security app that will replace whatever policy you have in place right now. We get the feeling it's a tech exercise designed to show off the power of your smartphone rather than an app with true real-world applications, as it's just faster and easier to type in a password.

DOWNLOAD: Facelock
Size: 0.17MB
Price: Free