A new Snapdragon 835-powered Motorola Moto Z has been spotted on benchmarking site

A listing for a Motorola XT1650 that’s powered by a Qualcomm MSM8998 chip has been spotted on benchmarking site Geekbench. Why does that matter? XT1650 was the model number of the original Motorola Moto Z and MSM8998 is the model number for Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 835 chipset. Add two and two together and it certainly looks like a new Snapdragon 835-powered Moto Z is on the way. By the way, the listing suggests a device with “only” 4 GB of RAM. The Moto Z is the first modular smartphone from Lenovo-owned Motorola and features a lineup of mods called Moto Mods. In our testing , we did find those mods to be a bit disappointing, especially at the asking price. The phone, however, wasn’t too bad. If a new Moto Z is indeed in the works, we do have to wonder how Motorola plans to implement these Moto mods. Will it stick to the same body design to accommodate previous mods (the camera mod alone costs Rs 20,000)? It’s quite likely that the new device will be announced at this year’s MWC next month in Barcelona. Judging by the GeekBench listing, the Snapdragon 835 appears to be around 30 percent faster than the current flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 821 in the multi-core department. In fact, the score puts the SD835’s multi-core score above the iPhone 7 Plus’ 2.34 GHz Apple A10 Fusion SoC. The single-core score still lags far behind, however.