New smartphones are focusing on your selfies

A new generation of smartphones are all about the selfie.

Phone makers, catching on to the pop culture phenomenon that is the selfie, are focusing a portion of their handset technologies on making selfies easier to take.

This means a new batch of phones with wide-angle lenses and improved pixel counts for the once secondary front-facing camera.

Samsung’s new Galaxy Note, for example, comes with a 3.7-mega-pixel front-facing camera, and a new feature called “wide selfie” that lets users cram more people into shots — including themselves.

The new Galaxy phone, which goes on sale later this year, also seeks to make it dramatically easier to snap a selfie by letting users take shots with a tap of a heart-rate monitor button on the back.

Plus, the heart-rate monitor function will only work if the camera sensor “sees” a face.

Not to be outdone, Microsoft’s Nokia just announced a new phone it describes as “built for selfies and Skype.”

Like the Galaxy, the new Nokia Lumia 730 has a front-facing camera that comes with a higher pixel count at 5 mega-pixels, and a wide-angle lens for bigger selfies.

The new Nokia phone also comes with the “Lumia Selfie” app, made for editing selfies to make them look more glamorous.

It is not known if Apple CEO Tim Cook, when he unveils the iPhone 6 next week, will address the selfie phenomenon.