Eagerly awaited Ice Cream Sandwich is now almost ready to hit the market. Delivering his keynote address at Dreamforce 2011, Schmidt
announced that the dessert, oops, operating system is likely to be released in the month of October or November. He also said that his company is ‘very excited about’ the new iteration of Android platform. Well, so are we!
The new OS expected to bridge the gap between Honeycomb and Gingerbread series. Honeycomb is tablet centric version of Android, whereas Gingerbread series is meant for smaller screen devices such as smart phones. However, Microsoft is currently working on Windows 8, which is expected to be a hybrid OS, capable of handling both PCs and tablets. And Ice Cream Sandwich is expected to be its arch enemy. Though, if the Ice Cream Sandwich gets released in October, then it will beat Windows 8 by fair margin, which is expected to hit the market early next year.
The October launch of Ice Cream Sandwich will also allow the manufacturers to come up with new devices by the time for Mobile World Congress next year. Google is likely to launch Google Nexus Prime as flagship Ice Cream device. Te contraption is being produced in collaboration with Samsung. Another device rumored to be graced with Ice Cream is Sony Ericsson’s Nozomi, which is also expected to sport powerful 12 MP camera.
Indeed, the new version is going to be all glossy and lovely. However, it is also likely to increase the current fragmentation problem. According to some reports, more than half of Android devices are still running Froyo version of Android which was released in 2010.