A Motorola-made handset identified as the upcoming Moto G6 was spotted in the database of Android benchmarking service Geekbench earlier today, having been listed with specs that place it in the mid-range segment of the smartphone market. The unannounced device is supposedly powered by the Snapdragon 625, Qualcomm’s 2016 system-on-chip which has already been commercialized inside a wide variety of mid-range mobile devices such as the Samsung Galaxy C7, ASUS ZenFone 3, Huawei Nova Plus, and the Xiaomi Mi Max 2. The benchmark found the phone’s silicon was running at up to 1.8GHz, though that figure presumably pertains to its energy-efficient cluster, with the chip itself otherwise having a maximum operating frequency of 2.0GHz, according to Qualcomm’s official product specifications.
The Moto G6 also boasts 3GB of RAM, the benchmark reveals, with that configuration likely being backed by 32GB of internal flash memory expandable via a microSD card slot, as was the case with the more premium variant of the Moto G5 which Motorola launched at the 2017 edition of Mobile World Congress. The newly spotted device was tested while running Android 8.0 Oreo, suggesting the handset will ship with support for Google’s Project Treble. The initiative itself is meant to rework the framework of the ubiquitous operating system so as to separate it from any custom vendor implementation, reducing the amount of work needed for optimizing security updates and other software upgrades for devices running reskinned versions of Android. As such, Project Treble has the potential to make the Android ecosystem less fragmented and allow original equipment manufacturers to distribute updates for their smartphones and tablets in a timelier and more affordable manner. Devices being upgraded to Android 8.0 Oreo don’t have to support Project Treble but those that are shipping with the new OS do.
Besides the Moto G6, the Lenovo-owned phone maker is also expected to launch the Moto G6 Plus and Moto G6 Play this spring, with all three devices being likely to debut at MWC 2018 which is officially opening its doors to the public next week. The upcoming lineup will be available in at least a handful of color options and several memory configurations, with its most affordable models being likely to start at below $200, according to recent reports.