Motorola’s next flagship smartphone is lurking in the shadows
With the popular Droid/Milestone smartphone, Motorola has made a bit of a comeback over the past several months to stake a claim in the competitive smartphone market. But in the light of more powerful recent releases such as the Nexus One, Droid Incredible, and upcoming EVO 4G, we have started wondering what the company has up their sleeves regarding a successor. We had previously heard about a new model known as the Motorola Shadow and there was also that related rumor about Motorola working with Google to create the "Nexus Two." Since then, there has been a trickle of information regarding the Shadow as the next flagship Android smartphone from the company.
Over the past few days, a small breakthrough has occurred with a Verizon-branded prototype Shadow being found in a gym, providing us with the first glimpses of the new handset and a peek into what kind of hardware we can expect. Although not quite as revealing as the iPhone 4G leak, a user on the Howard Forums has posted the image you see above and a picture of the Shadow's Getting Started manual. Some of the alleged technical specifications from the same source include a 4.1-inch touch screen, 8MP camera, 8GB local storage, HDMI output (as shown above), and a 720MHz ARM Cortex A8-based TI OMAP 3630 processor.
Keeping in mind that the images and information are all unconfirmed, if true, this early glimpse is looking positive and the Shadow may be a device to look forward to. The decision to stick with the OMAP processor family is interesting consider the popularity of Snapdragon, but the 3630 does have the advantage of a better graphics core, the PowerVR SGX530, when compared to the older AMD Z430 GPU used by Qualcomm. The question now is when can we expect the Shadow to hit the market. Are you looking forward to the next Android phone from Motorola?
