It was a fine day in October and everything was humming along as usual. Then, a leak happened.

In October this year, an internal roadmap was leaked which showed Motorola’s plans for the next two quarters. It had the Sholes on it and the Motus too. Thus far, that leak has turned out to be quite accurate. [read]

And then, a day came early this month when a new Motorola phone hit the FCC. Of course, it made its way to the blog world like all other big findings before it. It is a triband HSPA device and it carries the name Motus. As we all know by now, the Droid was already already looming over us at that point. [read]

Then yesterday, we had the first leaked photo. So lets take a close look at it. It is a typical candybar smartphone with a slide-out full QWERTY keypad. The keys look flatter than even the Droid’s keys if anything. It reminds of the chemically etched keypads of the RAZR days. They used to be pretty flat out too. The picture is quite hazy, so there isn’t much more to talk about, except that it somehow looks pretty thin. [read]

And just a while ago, we had more news of this. The details have been leaked and it is apparently heading for AT&T. It is triband alright – 850/1900/2100MHz, 7.2Mbps HSDPA, 3.1” capacitive touchscreen display with 480×320 resolution. There’s also an expansion slot supporting microSD cards and a Qualcomm CPU clocked at 528MHz. And this is an Android phone. Motorola is on a roll here. I wonder what the Zeppelin is going to be like.

it also has been named as the Backflip, probably. There has been a tip off that the phone includes features such as a reverse flip keypad and rear directional touch pad. With all this ‘rear’ I wonder what it will look like in person. [read]

Still, I think Motorola has gotten stuck in a rinse-repeat routine. They are constantly bringing out phones that are not really all that different from each other. Some are just better made with better features (like the Droid) and some are simply stripped down versions of those better ones. The overall design concept remains the same – put in candybar form factor, add slideout keypad, use Android OS, decide on how expensive it will be, done. Droid, Cliq, Dext and now Motus/Backflip.

Currently, it is pretty evident from all the pictures and rumors that the Droid is heading for the Verizon Wireless (and may be other places too). The real question is when does it get here. Logic would suggest that making a grand entry before the imminent holiday season is the best way to go. And indeed, it looks like that is exactly what will happen.

MobileCrunch has posted a conversation where an official from VZW reveals that the Sholes is coming soon. The conversation took place on twitter of all places! I mean I can see a non-descript meeting at an undisclosed public place and the usual “this conversation never took place” deal. But twitter? Seriously?

Anyway, there have been a lot of rumors around this device and a quite a few spy shots have been posted on the Internet. What is interesting to note is that there is no consistent source for this, except for may be the Boy Genius Report blog. They have been putting up a lot of Sholes/Droid spy shots and screenshots lately. But other than them, you have such varied places as motofan , Engadget Mobile, Mobile Crunch and there was also the Verizon Google announcement where the CEO’s of the two company held out unannounced phones and did not say a thing about them. Pretty much everyone caught that one.

About the specs, we know very little. From what the rumor mill has churned out, it seems like the phone will be powered by an ARM Cortex A8 chip and there are some who think it will be the Qualcomm Snapdragon. If it indeed is the Snapdragon, then we are likely to see a pretty snappy Android phone. The kind that we are yet to experience. This article from Anand of AnandTech explains why the Android phones have been sluggish and why it is about to change as of 1.6 (Donut).

All in all, it is quite likely that this Android phone will blow your socks off with its speed and performance. And that is not the only thing that is pulling people to this new offering from Motorola. This is going to be a ‘Google Experience’ phone. That means this phone is not going to have any bit of that MOTOBLUR UI that has hurt the CLIQ more than it has helped it. The Droid will instead have the pristine elegance that Google intended for the Android.

Looking at the screen shot from BGR that shows the official name of the phone, there seems to be scope for another speculation that is tied in with the device. It shows the firmware version as 2.0. That means it is already running Android 2.0 AKA Éclair, right? I would like to remind you folks that a giant foam Éclair was delivered to the Google lawn only recently.

So if the Droid is around the corner and it is running the Éclair release and the said Éclair was already delivered to Google HQ, does that mean 2.0 for the rest of us isn’t very far away? We’ll see. Meanwhile, enjoy this video of the Droid booting, complete with robot voice.