The Nexus 6 is incredibly large and also amazingly good. But as your fingers slide around that monstrous screen, there’s one thing that’s missing: fingerprint recognition. And that, apparently, is Apple’s fault.
In an interview with The Telegraph, former Motorola CEO and current Dropbox leader Dennis Woodside explains that the fingerprint technology that Motorola had been leaning on was robbed away from it by Apple. In 2011, he says, Moto was pioneering fingerprint recognition by working with a company called Authentec. But then in 2012 it was bought by Apple to fuel Touch ID for a cool $US356 million. That left Motorola with a problem. Referring specifically to the Nexus 6, Woodside explains:
“The secret behind that is that it was supposed to be fingerprint recognition, and Apple bought the best supplier. So the second best supplier was the only one available to everyone else in the industry and they weren’t there yet.”
It was almost certainly the right idea to leave out crappy fingerprint recognition — which can be maddening in use — but it’s a shame for Google and Moto that it got the carpet tugged from under it by Apple. [Telegraph via Engadget]