By all accounts, lots and lots of original Motorola DROID owners have upgraded to Verizon’s Galaxy Nexus now that many of them are past their two-year upgrade point. But there’s still something to be said for physical keyboards, and those waiting for a high-end QWERTY phone have been largely ignored on Verizon for the last several months. The DROID 4 has been eagerly awaited by those wishing for some LTE goodness mixed with RAZR styling, but the latest rumored date (yesterday) didn’t pan out. In the meantime, have a gander at these renders dug up by Droid Life, covering every digital millimeter of the upcoming phone.

The DROID 4 will be just the second Verizon LTE device with a full keyboard, and borrow largely from the DROID RAZR and DROID XYBOARD. The tapered look around the 4-inch screen, as does the 960 x 540 resolution, but unfortunately the screen itself is a mere LCD. Inside you’ll get 16GB of storage for Android Gingerbread to play with, though unfortunately it’ll do so with a locked bootloader. Unlike the slinky RAZR, the DROID 4 will retain its removable battery. At this point a release before January seems unlikely, and Verizon or Motorola may choose to reveal the phone at CES for a February debut.

The phone showed up on an internal page of Verizon’s DROID DOES marketing page, where every DROID phone has been featured since the original. That’s a pretty good indication that it will see a full marketing rollout eventually, with another Twitter scavenger hunt likely as not. Unfortunately it appears that the DROID 4 won’t follow in the footsteps of the DROID 3 and DROID 2 Global, and will forgo a multi-function radio compatible with international networks. That honor seems to be reserved for the upcoming HTC Fireball and LG Spectrum.