A Gizmodo tipster dropped one of the better leak stories I’ve heard late last night. As a summer intern at NASA’s JPL, Giz reader Zach was lucky enough to attend a technology show at the laboratory. Oddly enough, companies like Microsoft, Apple, Sprint and Verizon were on the scene with product demonstration booths. Being a DROID owner, Zach wandered over to the Verizon booth to see what they had in store for the season.

As he checked out “the successor to the original Motorola Droid,” Zach noticed a 5MP camera that was much faster than the one his own DROID features, a more rounded design, and, perhaps most importantly, a staggered keyboard with softer keys and no lip on the right end to get in your way. The face-mounted d-pad has been replaced with the standard keyboard arrows you see on laptops. The phone had 8GB of internal storage and an 8GB microSD card. And, of course, it packs a 1GHz processor.

The Verizon rep told Zach that, while this unit was running 2.1 with Blur on top, it was likely to launch (in the next few weeks, possibly under a different name) with vanilla Android version 2.2. If it does launch with 2.1 and Blur, she said, an update would come shortly thereafter.

Via Gizmodo