The good news for Motorola (NYSE: MOT) fans is that the troubled handset maker is busy at work on its own version of an Android-based smartphone, which according to Businessweek.com will have a touchscreen the size of the iPhone, a slide-out qwerty keyboard, and a load of social networking features. The bad news is that the phone is going to take a while to emerge. In the US, the phone—which apparently has the direct support from new co-CEO Sanjay Jha, is slated to appear sometime in the second quarter, with phones rolling out in Europe possibly even later, in the third quarter, according to “people familiar Motorola’s plans.”

If Moto is going to try to recapture some of its declining market share, it has got to get new phones out quicker than that. Everyone in the handset business is supposedly working on an Android phone, and as Businessweek argues, the longer the launch time, the more time rivals have to gain traction. Meanwhile, to those who have seen the spec sheets that Motorola has been showing to operators around the world, the phone looks like a “higher-end version” of the forthcoming HTC Android phone, but is expected to come in at a price similar to Motorola’s touchscreen Krave, which retails at $150 for a two-year contract.