In an interview with The Telegraph, Former Motorola CEO and current Dropbox COO Dennis Woodside revealed that the dimple on the Nexus 6 which currently features a Motorola logo was initially meant to be a fingerprint reader until Apple stepped in. "The secret behind that is that it was supposed to be fingerprint recognition, and Apple bought the best supplier," said Woodside. "So the second best supplier was the only one available to everyone else in the industry and they weren't there yet." The supplier in question is AuthenTec, which Apple acquired back in 2012 for $356 million. Devices that include fingerprint scanners other than AuthenTec's tend to be slow or buggy, leaving users frustrated and often abandoning the security feature. HTC and Samsung took a chance at this less-than-spectacular biometric technology with their HTC One max and Samsung Galaxy S5 but many users have reported issues with the feature, calling it unreliable, and most do not even use it. Motorola and Google have declined to comment on Woodside's comments.
Woodside, who previously worked for Google, took over Motorola when it was acquired by the tech giant and left not long after it was sold to Lenovo. The comments on the Nexus 6 were made as part of a push for his new role as chief operating officer at cloud company Dropbox though he claims that a fingerprint scanner "wouldn't have made that big a difference" for the smartphone. In terms of his new company, Woodside said that Drop box is growing, expanding, and adapting to users. "We recognized that many people are already using a set of really good tools that tend to be desktop based and that's probably what they want to keep using - so our approach is to build a compatible layer for people using those products and help virtualize some of that activity," said Woodside. "Our expectation is not that you're going to abandon Word. Dropbox can be the glue between those established services." Last week, Dropbox opened an office in London to bolster UK growth.
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