Okay, sorry about the headline. That'll be my last Android version codename pun for a while, honest.
But with Android 2.3 ("Gingerbread") and 3.0 ("Honeycomb") out in the open, it's time to start looking ahead to the next Android version, supposedly dubbed "Ice Cream."
There's not much to go on right now, but Pocket-Lint says it's spoken with several sources who say Android 2.4 will be released this summer. During the Consumer Electronics Show last week, a Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc phone was reportedly running the new version. (When I tried out the phone, a Sony rep said it was running Android 2.3.)
Android 2.4 will reportedly be announced at Google's I/O conference in May, and will launch in June or July. That makes sense, given that Google announced Android 2.2 at last year's conference., and released it to Nexus One the following June. If history repeats itself, most other Android phones won't get the update until the fall or winter, if at all.
So what's actually new in Android 2.4? No one really knows. Some videos from October show a revamped media player, but at the time they were believed to be showing Honeycomb, which is now confirmed to be Google's tablet OS.
Whatever the new version includes, I hope the Android smartphones announced at CES don't get left behind. I saw some great hardware at the show, and it'd be a shame to see it become old bread before the year is up.
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