Ah – another day, another Android rumor. As Android fleshes itself out into the torrential go-to OS for smartphone manufacturers that we’ve all hoped it would, we can expect to see more and more Android rumors rambling about. In other words,

According to TheUnlockr, the phone you’re looking at above is none other than HTC’s first Snapdragon-powered Android phone, the Passion for Verizon. That seems a bit strange for a couple of reasons:

• It looks nearly identical to the HTC-made Android phone spotted a few weeks back, which was purportedly a VZW-purposed variant of the HTC Hero. Would Verizon carry two nearly identical phones with greatly differing specs?
• There’s no Verizon branding; of all carriers, Verizon tends to be their one that sticks their branding onto prototypes way, way early in the game.
• As Phonedog points out, the status bar icons don’t match up with past leaks.

Of course, all of these tidbits can be explained away somewhat easily; the “Verizon Hero” we saw earlier might not have been the Hero, but an earlier prototype Passion, the branding might just not be finalized yet, and icons are bound to change from revision to revision. With all that said, these points give us just enough pause to keep us from positively agreeing that this is the Verizon Passion.