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Nexus 6 would have had a fingerprint reader, but Apple RUINED IT ALL

Motorola ex-CEO says Cupertino killed off its partner

The former CEO of Motorola Mobility says the company's Nexus 6 phablet would have been a nicer piece of kit, were it not for Apple's inteference.

Speaking in an interview with The Telegraph, Dennis Woodside said that his company was in the process of putting a fingerprint reader on its newest six-inch phone when Cook & Co stepped in and ruined everything.

"The secret behind that is that it was supposed to be fingerprint recognition, and Apple bought the best supplier," Woodside was quoted as saying. "So the second-best supplier was the only one available to everyone else in the industry and they weren’t there yet."

That "best supplier" he mentions would be none other than AuthenTec, which Cupertino gobbled for $350m in 2012.

Woodside made his comments as part of a push for his role at cloud firm Dropbox. He stepped away from Motorola Mobility last year ahead of the firm's transfer from Google to Lenovo and took the chief operating officer role at Dropbox.

Apple has offered fingerprint scanning in the iPhone since the 2013 release of the 5s model. The iPad got the print-scanning technology last year with the launch of the iPad Air 2 and Mini 3.

Motorola released the Nexus 6 last year, pitting the device against Apple's iPhone 6 Plus in the phablet space. The handset received reasonably strong reviews from Reg testers who noted its solid hardware design.

That the fingerprint-reader functionality was dropped from the Nexus 6 may not be such a problem to those concerned with personal privacy, however. A US court has ruled that the print identification features are not covered alongside passwords under the Fifth Amendment, and thus citizens can be forced to unlock their phones with print identification. ®

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