Talking tech since 2003

A post on Phandroid Thursday reports that the newest smartwatch from Motorola, a possible follow up to its truly buzzworthy Moto 360 Android Wear device from last year, is out in the wild being tested. And it has the worst codename of any product in history: “Smelt.”

shamu-specs
The Nexus 6 was once known only as “Shamu.”

That’s right, “Smelt.” Most Android-based products receive sea life-inspired names. The Motorola-made Nexus 6 was “Shamu,” while the first Moto 360 was “Minnow.” So when an app developer told Phandroid about a device called “Smelt” he noticed “pinging his Android developer console from Mundelein, a city not too far from Motorola’s HQ in Chicago,” he investigated a little further.

The device is running Android 5.1, and has a screen resolution of 360 x 360. The Moto 360 had a resolution of 320 x 290, the non-matching numbers a result of the black space left at the bottom of the device’s display, which housed the ambient light sensor.  If that resolution figure is, in fact, on a smartwatch (and with numbers like that, it seems unlikely it’d be anything else), we can surmise that it won’t have a black space like the Moto 360.

That could mean that it’s got a completely round display. Or, it could also be a perfect square—though that’s pretty unlikely given the big deal people have made about round-faced smartwatches since Android Wear debuted last year. Either way, it seems likely that whatever it is, it could very well be the new Moto 360.

Who knows, though? Google I/O is coming up, so we’ll probably see a whole bunch of new Android Wear devices there. I’d be surprised if Motorola sat it out, considering they didn’t show off any new smartwatches at MWC last month. Stay tuned.

[Source: Phandroid via 9to5Google]

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