The Droid X² may be the Motorola smartphone getting all the spotlight lately, with its first press shots showing up late last week, but there may be yet another Moto Droid lurking in the shadows, as Droid-life has received some pictures of an unidentified Motorola model, purported to be an in-house multi-core prototype.

While this pictured model looks quite similar to the Droid X, you’ll notice this smartphone features a silver faceplate and is significantly thicker than the Droid X, with a bulging battery cover in the rear. While there have been extended batteries available for the Droid X which included replacement covers to let them stick out a bit, we haven’t seen anything like this. It doesn’t quite look like a production model, at any rate, as it doesn’t fit flush against the smartphone’s body. Droid-life speculates that we could be seeing a gutted shell of a Droid X used as a testbed for prototyping new hardware, with the extended case giving engineers room to work.

The silver border around the phone’s screen recalls the Droid X SE we looked at last fall, which never made it to market. Could Motorola have a stash of these cases it’s been using for spare parts? According to the source, this prototype is multi-core, has a 12-megapixel camera, a qHD screen, and is just one of five similarly-equipped smartphones being worked on. For now, we’ll just have to keep our eyes open and see if we don’t run across this odd hardware again, hopefully with some explanation accompanying it.

Source: Droid-life