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During an earning's call in August, Sprint's Chief Operating Officer Len Lauer said the operator would start offering Moto's Q smartphone during the fourth quarter. So consumers locked into a Sprint contract or unwilling to switch to Verizon Wireless, which has held an exclusive on the Q since its launch, could soon get their chance to see what the fuss is all about.

Nothing else has been heard about Sprint's go at the Q since the summer, however. That is until today, when the blog Engadget posted some leaked pictures of the smartphone.

The images show the black variant of the Q, which Canadian operator Bell Canada and Telus have been offering for some time now, and not the sliver version Verizon carries. Rumors say Verizon will soon deliver the black Q as well.

Other than a change in hue and Sprint logos plastered on the front and back and an operator-specific Windows Mobile theme, the Sprint Q will otherwise be essentially the same as Verizon's.

Of course, this still makes the Q a CDMA/EV-DO only affair, as both Sprint and competitor Verizon use these cellular-network standards. Customers of operators like Cingular in the U.S. and most international mobile operators, which leverage the GSM standard and versions of WCDMA UTMS technology for 3G, must still wait for news about when their Q day will arrive.

GSM carriers like T-Mobile with the Dash and RIM BlackBerry Pearl and Cingular with the Nokia E62, 3125, 8525, Samsung BlackJack and more have started offering a number of new smartphones since the launch of the Q, dimming the Windows Mobile phone's star a bit.

Motorola isn't going to stand still though: The word's number two mobile phone company is planning to upgrade the slim (.45-inch, 11-millimeter) Q with the release of a Pro edition (code-named Norman), likely for GSM operators, early next year.

Today's Q sports a QWERTY thumb-keyboard and measures a compact 4.6 x 2.5 x 0.45 inches. Additional features include a 320 x 240-pixel screen - not touch because it is a Windows Smartphone and not a Pocket PC Phone - dual stereo speakers, Bluetooth 1.2 for personal area networking (connecting to headsets, printers) and a 1.3 megapixel camera with photo lighting for picture and video. There's a miniSD slot for storage expansion, 64 MB of RAM, 128 MB of Flash ROM, as well as a 5-way navigation button and thumb wheel.

For more on the Motorola Q, see our review.