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Motorola mocks iPhone 5s fingerprint scanner, forgets its own phone had a fingerprint scanner first

Published Sep 12th, 2013 11:25AM EDT
iPhone 5s Fingerprint Scanner

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During Apple’s iPhone event this past Tuesday, a number of rival vendors took to Twitter in an attempt to have some fun at Apple’s expense. Unfortunately, most of them live in glass houses. Among the merry smartphone makers was Nokia, which poked fun as Apple’s colorful new iPhone 5c lineup as it gets ready to offload the failed handset business it couldn’t figure out how to revive, and Motorola, which made fun of the embedded fingerprint scanner on the iPhone 5s. The problem with Motorola mocking Apple’s new fingerprint scanner, of course, is the fact that Motorola itself launched a smartphone with an embedded fingerprint reader back in 2011.

“Remember that one time you were stoked to give your fingerprints? Us either,” Motorola wrote in a tweet. The vendor, which managed an operating loss of more than $300 million last quarter, then linked to its new promotional video, which promises that the Moto X is the answer to the “lazy phone.”

As Forbes points out, however, Motorola itself launched a smartphone with an embedded fingerprint scanner — and it wasn’t even that long ago.

The Motorola Atrix 4G featured an in-built print reader that was embedded in the phone’s unlock button. And as we discussed in out Atrix 4G review back in February 2011, the scanner served the exact same purpose as Apple’s fingerprint reader, allowing users to unlock the phone without having to enter a PIN code.

Oops.

Zach Epstein
Zach Epstein Executive Editor

Zach Epstein has been the Executive Editor at BGR for more than 10 years. He manages BGR’s editorial team and ensures that best practices are adhered to. He also oversees the Ecommerce team and directs the daily flow of all content. Zach first joined BGR in 2007 as a Staff Writer covering business, technology, and entertainment.

His work has been quoted by countless top news organizations, and he was recently named one of the world's top 10 “power mobile influencers” by Forbes. Prior to BGR, Zach worked as an executive in marketing and business development with two private telcos.