*Update: The tech site Android Police Thursday afternoon published a supposed "internal document" from Verizon that shows the Droid 4 going on sale Feb. 10.*
The next LTE smartphone from Verizon Wireless could make its debut as early as next week.
The Motorola Droid 4, showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show last month, reportedly was originally scheduled for a December launch, but sources now tell Droid Life it's coming Feb. 9, with a $199 price tag, if, of course, you sign a new, two-year service agreement with the carrier. Nothing official just yet from Verizon.
The Droid 4 comes with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but at just half-an-inch thick, it's isn't clunky. It runs on Android 2.3, but is expected to be upgraded to 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) sometime in 1H 2012. The handset comes with a dual-core, 1.2GHz processor and 1GB of RAM. Its rear-facing camera is 8 megapixels and shoots 1080p HD video.
The Droid 4 features a 4-inch display and 16GB of internal memory that can be expanded to 32GB with a microSD card.
A report earlier this week speculated that many manufacturers would wait to launch some of their high-end smartphones until sales of the iPhone 4S died down, but Motorola appears ready to buck that trend.
