Motorola removed fingerprint scanner from Nexus 6 due to malfunction

Motorola has removed the fingerprint scanner from the Nexus 6 because the technology was not yet good enough. That says former Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside in an interview. It was no longer a secret that a fingerprint scanner should have been in the Nexus 6.

The fingerprint scanner should have been on the back, where only a recessed Motorola logo is now. “The secret behind it is that it was intended for fingerprint recognition and Apple had bought the best supplier for it,” said the former Motorola chief executive in an interview with British newspaper The Telegraph. “So the second best supplier was the only one available to all the other companies in the industry and that company just wasn’t there yet.”

By the latter, Woodside probably means that the technology from that supplier was not yet good enough by Motorola’s standards. It is unknown which supplier he is referring to, but other manufacturers have recently supplied fingerprint scanners in phones, such as Samsung with the Galaxy S5 and Note 4. According to Woodside, the scanner “didn’t make much difference”.

It had been clear for some time that Motorola had the plan to equip the Nexus 6 with a fingerprint scanner. However, the manufacturer, now owned by Lenovo, had neither confirmed this nor given a reason why the scanner was removed. The Nexus 6 prototype featured a scanner that worked with a swipe across the scanner. Many users experience this as less user-friendly than Touch ID on recent iPhones, where users only have to put their finger on the home button.

Incidentally, it seems that Woodside has overlooked a supplier. Before the Nexus 6 came on the market, Huawei came out with the Ascend Mate 7, which, like the iPhone, has a scanner that works by putting your finger on it. The supplier of that scanner is the Swedish Fingerprint Cards.