Well here’s a surprise: Motorola appears to be working on a fourth generation of its popular Droid series of Android-powered QWERTY sliders, with Droid 4 EXIF data starting to show up left and right on photo-sharing sites. Unfortunately no one seems to have opened up the Droid 4 to its full resolution — whatever that may be — so we only have resized photos for judging image quality (which seems quite good in these preliminary shots).

According to a poster on Howard Forums, this handset is codenamed Maserati and, like the Droid 3, lacks a D-pad on the keyboard. As a Verizon-bound device, it will almost surely contain a 4G LTE radio. To quote the alleged observer, “For those of you who prefer a keyboard, you’re gonna love this one.”

If the past Droid release schedule of every nine to ten months continues to hold, we can probably expect the Droid 4 sometime in late spring or early summer 2012, meaning that it will almost certainly run Ice Cream Sandwich.