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Fingerprint scanning and recognition systems have been in use for a number of years now as they have been seen as an ideal way to solve some of the security problems with asking users to remember a four to eight digit PIN code, or a password. Whilst fingerprints have their own issues, a number of manufacturers have steadily worked away at including fingerprint scanners into devices. However, whilst Apple, Google, Sony, Samsung, Huawei and LG have used fingerprint scanners, Motorola have been absent from adopting the technology. This is now always the case – in 2011 Motorola released the ATRIX 4G, which came with a combination lock and fingerprint scanner button. Unfortunately, although the idea was slick, the ATRIX’s execution of the fingerprint scanner was not in the same league as modern smartphones. We have seen rumors that the Motorola-built Nexus 6 was supposed to have its own fingerprint scanner but the device did not receive this feature, although we’re sure Google would have not used Motorola’s ATRIX 4G experience as the reason for not including the scanner!
We have now seen a Tweet from technology journalist @Ricciolo1 with what amounts to a teaser that the next generation Motorola Moto X will come with a fingerprint scanner. We’ve already seen how the third generation device was linked with biometric fingerprint scanning but when both Moto X models were unveiled earlier in the year, the technology had passed Motorola by. We are unable to substantiate this claim and it very much falls into the camp of, “seems legitimate as other manufacturers are doing it.” This rumor follows in the wake of the leak claiming that the next generation Moto X will feature an internal heat pipe cooling system, which is the next logical step for device manufacturers needing to balance a high performance System-on-Chip with keeping the device cool.
We are expecting the next, fourth, generation Motorola Moto X models at some point in the second quarter, a few months after the new Samsung Galaxy S7 is expected to be revealed. At this juncture, most of the information about the crop of 2016 smartphones is at best hearsay and speculation. Motorola, however, have not tended to lead the field when it comes to headline specification but have instead introduced new features: the original Motorola Moto X released in 2013 featured an innovate always-on voice search function and a new way to show notifications in a power efficient way. The second generation Moto X introduced more clever ways to use on-device sensors and for the third generation, Motorola split the Moto X between two models with different specification. We’re not sure if Motorola will produce one or two Moto X 2016 models, and we have somewhere around five months before we find out.