Motorola takes biometric ID to the streets

A new attachment for two of Motorola's enterprise digital assistants (EDAs) gives police and other mobile security folk the gear to check fingerprints in the field.

It's the stuff of nightmares and various cheesy cop shows: The bad guy gets control of an officer's gun / radio / car and takes his mayhem to a new level. But with the announcement of a biometric attachment for two models of their EDAs popular with police and other security personnel, Motorola's looking to increase the peace.

The attachment, fruit of the company's 2007 acquisition of Symbol Technologies, gives Motorola's MC70/75EDAs -- which combine push-to-talk, GPS, a barcode scanner, and a camera, plus Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and infrared connectivity -- the ability to check fingerprints "in the field."

Moreover, an optional smart-card reader can check identities against secure documents, in theory keeping the gadget itself more secure by ensuring that the user has the right credentials to operate it. As a Motorola spokeswoman told BetaNews this afternoon, "In addition to password log-in only, [biometric attachment] provides a secondary layer of access control with fingerprint capture or with a common access card (smart card) reader. The fingerprint sensor can capture fingerprints and transmit to a network central server to authenticate a user for access. "

The MC70 and MC75, along with their new biometric attachments, are based on commercially available, off-the-shelf components and use the Windows Mobile 6 OS.