Here’s a little noodle-scratcher for you fellow mobile hardware nerds to ponder this evening. This little Motorola Mobility beauty, brandishing the model number XT1058, recently passed through the FCC and left the customary paper trail in its wake.
All right, maybe calling it a beauty is a bit of a stretch, but here’s the kicker: The rudimentary sketch included with the listing bears a striking resemblance to a slew of earlier leaked images that purportedly showed off Motorola’s secretive X Phone.
Consider the alignment of those three circular elements on the back — those bits match up rather nicely with the camera, LED flash, and Motorola logo/button as seen in images of an unreleased smartphone originally circulated by the team at Tinhte.vn. Even the seemingly curved section along the top edge where the device’s headphone jack lives and the placement of what appears to be the sleep/wake button are spot-on when compared to those leaked photos.
Having a hard time visualizing all that? Here’s a side by side view to give you a sense of the similarities:
Of course, this doesn’t bring us any closer to figuring out what the device is actually capable of — all the FCC’s listing reveals is that this thing sports radios for Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11ac and NFC. It could be that this is the first regulatory appearance of the so-called XFON, a device that noted gadget leaker @EvLeaks posted photos of earlier this month. After all, the XT1058 has been found to support AT&T’s particular LTE bands, and the XFON’s IMEI label clearly calls it out as an AT&T device.
At this point no one (save for the lucky chump who snapped those photos in the first place) can definitively say whether or not the XFON and this curious AT&T device are the same, but it’s distinctly possible. There are a few cosmetic similarities between the two — namely the Motorola logo stamped on the top-left corner, the shape of the speaker grille, and the placement of the indicator LED and the front-facing camera. Don’t pay too much attention to the chunky chassis though, as it’s not uncommon for non-final hardware to undergo testing clad in patently ugly shells. You may recall that BlackBerry’s Dev Alpha and Beta devices lived in similarly unflattering boxes before the innards were officially unveiled at a series of simultaneous launch events back in January.
For all of the things that Google is expected to show off next week at its annual I/O developer conference (the refreshed Nexus 7, a unified chat system, redesigned Google Maps, etc.), a brand-new smartphone wasn’t expected to be one of them. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the X Phone (or XFON, whatever) won’t make an appearance in San Francisco. But there has been a distinct lack of chatter that leads me to think that such a smartphone isn’t on the agenda. After all, Google’s been downright lousy at keeping things under wraps lately.