Mysterious Motorola ‘360S’ and ‘360L’ products pass through Brazil’s FCC

Two products with the model numbers 360S and 360L have passed through the telecommunications agency Anatel in the past week. While much information has been omitted from public eyes, a couple details lead us to believe that Motorola is reaching the launch of a successor to last year’s Android Wear-powered Moto 360 smartwatch — and in two sizes.

First some context: Anatel is Brazil’s telecommunications agency tasked with granting, regulating, and supervising telecommunications activity in the country. Any product with a radio in it that a corporation would like to sell commercially passes through this agency for approval before it can actually be legally sold in Brazil. To get that approval, corporations must hire a laboratory to test their products and then have the results sent to Anatel who conducts their own review to ensure compliance with the guidelines they themselves set for radio frequency products in the country (the strength of the electromagnetic wave frequencies they can release, for example).

Once a corporation gets the nod that their product conforms to Anatel’s standards, a certificate of approval along with the aforementioned lab results and other documentation, like product manuals, are added to Anatel’s website for anyone to see (save for anything requested to be temporarily redacted, that is). That’s exactly what happened here with the mysterious 360S and 360L products.

Aside from the obvious similarity between these model numbers and the Moto 360’s consumer-facing name, the technical compliance approval documents for both unfortunately leave much to be desired in the way of hard information on the devices save for (unsurprisingly) the radios they include (Bluetooth LE, WiFi b/g/n). There’s also mention of battery capacity — 270mAh in the 360S and 375mAh in the 360L — which isn’t too far from the original 360’s 320mAh capacity battery, and the documentation says the batteries are internal and non-removable, like the OG 360. Through some surface-level searching we were unable to find other non-smartwatch Motorola products with battery capacities in a similar range.

It’s also worth noting that, anecdotally speaking, this same type of documentation for the original Moto 360 was discovered in Anatel’s database nearly one year ago to the day, right before it was released on September 5th, although that time the documentation explicitly said the product tested was a watch and even referred to it as the Moto 360. Furthering the evidence available, we just today saw Motorola post and shortly thereafter pull a tweet containing a video which showed a smartwatch that has some differences from the Moto 360 which line up 1:1 with images accidentally (we assume it was accidental) posted by Lenovo’s CEO several months back of what looked to be new Moto 360 prototypes. We believe it could have been promotional material that was posted too early.

All of this put together makes it hard for us to believe that an updated Moto 360 is not on the horizon, but having two ‘S’ and ‘L’ variants is definitely a bit of a plot twist. Is the 2nd-gen Moto 360 going to be available in two sizes? It’d at least make a lot of sense for people with different wrist sizes to have that choice.

You might also notice in the picture at the top a listing for a new Motorola smartphone, model number XT1580. We’re not sure exactly what it is, as its documentation includes even less detail than the listings for the 360L and 360S. One possibility is that it’s an updated DROID Turbo. This phone came out in October of last year with a model number of XT1254 (plus some extra characters appended to the front to signify regions and carriers), so the timing is somewhat close but the jump from 254 to 580 isn’t exactly linear, as 254 doubled is 508. Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts on this one.

Thanks, Rafael!