The elusive white Nexus 4 has popped up on our radar on more than one occasion in the past, but as of yesterday, things got really real. And by real, I mean heavily augmented, stylized, and touched-up in Photoshop. We were provided some press photos of the device, leading us to believe that this baby (this baby being a pearly-white Nexus 4) is coming. The rumored released date, according to AndroidAndMe, is June 10th. Oddly, our tipster indicated that the phone is listed as running Android 4.2, though that doesn't exactly seem likely, given we know 4.3 is a thing and probably on the way soon enough. Someone even saw it in Thailand at a trade convention, apparently on vacation from the rigors of being developed.

But is a white Nexus 4 too little, too late? Given that some people were for some utterly inexplicable reason holding out for an all-new Nexus 5 at Google I/O - an unlikelihood somewhere on the level of Matias Duarte wearing an uninteresting outfit - a partially-bleached Nexus 4 with a [potential] software revision just may not get your juices flowing at this point.

As far as we can tell, the whitening will not bring about a model of higher storage capacity, and entails the same internals as the noire Nexus of old. That means the reliable-but-no-longer-cutting-edge APQ8064 quad-core chip, an HSPA+ radio, and a 720p display that is best classified as good enough for most human retinas. The Nexus 4 is obviously a very solid phone, but even a well-placed Apple jab can't distract from the fact that it simply isn't as competitive on a spec-for-spec basis as the latest and greatest from Samsung and HTC.

So, why release it now, then? I mean, I also don't really see why not, but it's kind of hard to get excited about a non-LTE phone with a 720p display and crack-prone posterior. What about you - does the white Nexus 4 leave you drawing a blanc, or is the long hunt for your Moby Dick (you know, if a whale was a phone or whatever) finally nearing an end? Vote in the poll below.