AndroidSPIN has posted bits of a conversation from Howard Forums from a person claiming to have their hands on a Motorola Shadow. The same HF individual posted a couple of screenshots of a benchmarking app called Quadrant Standard, reportedly running on the device.

The first test results placed (the purported) Shadow at the very top of the list of tested Androids, while the second left it two slots below “Motorola Shadow < 2.2."

There are questions about what version of Android the device is running and whether or not those screen grabs are real. And while I can’t confirm anything in either case, it’s quite possible that a pre-release unit could be running 2.1, with 2.2 planned for the final launch. What I can say for sure is that the results of Quandrant Standard can be skewed by various factors, so the difference in the two results at AndroidSPIN really don’t indicate anything at all. I ran the test on my Nexus One running a pre-release of 2.2 and I found different results depending on how long it had been since reboot, what I was doing just before the test, etc. As you can see in the images below, my results line up with their “Nexus One > 2.2″ stats, but my phone appeared several places further down the list not ten minutes earlier.

So, assuming for a moment that the images are real (and I am prepared to do that), it looks like the Shadow could be the new Android to beat – especially if/when it sees the highly optimized Froyo update. Notice the difference in performance between a Nexus running 2.1 and a Nexus running 2.2 in the screenshots of my N1 running Quadrant Standard:

Via AndroidSPIN