Android 2.4 Ice Cream Coming In Time for Google I/O?
A shot of the unreleased Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc running Android 2.4 threw us for a bit of a loop last week — Android 2.3 had just been released and Android 3.0 Honeycomb was just officially shown off at CES (also checking out the Arc at CES, it wasn’t running a build of 2.4, and now SE is claiming the OS version number is actually the result of a configuration mistake and not a different OS version at all). Our immediate thought was that Google is in fact not slowing up on Android updates as they have said would be the case. The latest source-fed information seems to confirm this, claiming Ice Cream will be ready for release this summer. That no doubt equates to a Google I/O 2011 unveiling.
Saving the release for I/O suggests it may carry some of the larger changes we were expecting in Gingerbread, but we doubt it will be anything like the huge overhaul that is Honeycomb. Hopefully some of those awesome features make it into the build, anyway. The bigger issue is fragmentation, which over the past two months seems to be becoming a bigger problem than ever. Perhaps a larger looming issue is the problem Google has created for itself as 2.x phone builds near the 3.0 build for tablets. Who knows what will happen when those numbers converge…
[via AndroidCommunity]