During his keynote address, Google’s outgoing CEO Eric Schmidt clarified speculation that’s been buzzing around MWC about the next Android OS for mobile. Schmidt said that for this unnamed future OS (which he says starts with an “I” and is a dessert [Ice Cream or Ice Cream Sandwich, obviously],) Google is going to apply some of the lessons and features learned in writing Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) for tablets. The future will still contain two separate versions of OS, that being a tablet track and a smartphone track, but they’ll be much more compatible upon the release of whichever version is next for mobile.

Scmidt also went on to say that current Android updates are on a six month cycle (Gingerbread was released last December with the Google Nexus S but hasn’t really populated to nearly the % of users on Froyo.) Keeping with the six month cycle, the next version of Android for mobile (be it 2.5, 2.6, or so on) may get leapfrogged and a new update released in April instead.

[via SlashGear]

5 COMMENTS

  1. No! Sorry but this conclusion is wrong – he said this next version will run on both smartphones and tablets, and the current tablet-specific version is 3.0 – they wouldn’t go down to 2.4 for tablets. What we know so far about 2.4 is that it’ll probably be another Gingerbread release (as 2.0 and 2.1 were both Eclair) – and in terms of new features I assume it won’t be much different to the 2.3.1/2/3 releases.

    What I think is more likely is a 3.1 or 3.5 release that’ll carry the ‘I’ codename (yes possibly Ice Cream Sandwich), and it’ll basically bring smartphone/small screen support to the new UI introduced with Honeycomb (and of course carry all the new framework of 3.0, such as Renderscript, etc).

    • That’s what I just came to post…

      2.3 and 2.4 are the same release letter and “I” is somewhere in the 3.X.

      Edit: It looks VentureBeat is agreeing with us.

    • I agree, although Google may throw us all off with the “I” like they did with “F” (many assumed “Flan” for a long time).

      I kind of like “Icing.” Well, I like it better than “Ice Cream Sandwich,” anyway.

      One thing seems clear, Android “I” will be a 3.x release.

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