MSFN Forum: Android Ice Cream Sandwich Arriving Q4 2011

This morning at Google I/O, the Android team shared some updates. It’s hard to believe a little more than two and a half years ago, we were just one device, launching in one country, on one carrier. Thanks to the ecosystem of manufacturers, developers and carriers, the platform has grown exponentially. There are now:

• 100 million activated Android devices
  
• 400,000 new Android devices activated every day
  
• 200,000 free and paid applications available in Android Market
  
• 4.5 billion applications installed from Android Market

Mobile—one OS everywhere

Over the past two and a half years, we’ve shipped eight releases of Android and there are now more than 310 Android devices around the world, of all shapes and sizes. This morning we talked about our next version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich. Our goal with Ice Cream Sandwich is to deliver one operating system that works everywhere, regardless of device. Ice Cream Sandwich will bring everything you love about Honeycomb on your tablet to your phone, including the holographic user interface, more multitasking, the new launcher and richer widgets.

We also launched Music Beta by Google, a new service that lets you upload your personal music collection to the cloud for streaming to your computer and Android devices. With the new service, your music and playlists are automatically kept in sync, so if you create a new playlist on your phone, it’s instantly available on your computer or tablet. You can use a feature called Instant Mix to create a playlist of songs that go well together. You can even listen to music when you’re offline: we automatically store your most recently played music on your Android device and you can choose to make specific albums or playlists available when you’re not connected. The service is launching in beta today to U.S. users and is available by invitation.



According to TrustedReviews IceCream will be released by the end of this year:

At Google I/O in San Francisco, the Mountain View company has announced a new version of Android which will bring the OS back together. Android Ice Cream Sandwich will be the next major update for the platform, coming towards the end of the year and Google promise it will intelligently adapt to whatever device it is running on. Continuing the dessert theme, Google will hope this new version of Android will finally tie together the tablet and smartphone Android ecosystems. Details of what Ice Cream Sandwich (that’s going to get annoying to say all the time) will bring are quite sketchy so far but we do have some clues from the keynote in San Fran yesterday evening.

Source: TrustedReviews & Android Blog