While everyone is patiently awaiting the Motorola Droid Bionic for Verizon and all its LTE goodness, it actually may not be bound to just one carrier. According the screenshot above, there’s another version of the Bionic that just might be coming to AT&T.
The screenshot above doesn’t look to say much if you didn’t know what to look for, other than showing off different versions for Motorola’s custom UI Motoblur. The small code following the version number is what to look for. You can see three mentions of the MB860 and one of the MB865. Well, a quick Google search for MB865 will return results for the Motorola Atrix 4G but if you do a search for MB865, you’ll get results for the Droid Bionic. Say what?
Since the Droid Bionic is obviously a Verizon device, we didn’t think much of it but after doing a little more digging and getting more familiar with model numbers, it definitely looks like AT&T may be getting it’s very own version of the Bionic.
We already know that the AT&T model numbers ship with “MB” in front of them, and while Verizon has more than one set of code names for its Motorola phones (MOT, for example), you’ll find that XT is pretty common. Searching XT865 will return a result for the Droid Bionic from the Motorola site itself, and if you look at Verizon’s latest Motorola handset, the Droid 3, it has a model number of XT862. So if you notice the trend, Verizon uses XT (among others) and AT&T uses MB.
While nothing is confirmed until the official announcement, it would be interesting to see an AT&T Bionic land sometime in the near future. The real question is whether the handset will retain a LTE radio inside. With AT&T’s LTE network virtually non-existent compared to Verizon‘s, it going to need some hot hardware to take on Big Red. A Motorola Bionic just might do it.
So what do you think? Is this a simple mistake, coincidence, or is AT&T going to have its own version of one of the most anticipated phones from Motorola?
