Google’s next version of Android will provide a combined version of Honeycomb and Gingerbread operating systems for phones, tablets and other devices, and will arrive in the fourth quarter of this year.
Ice Scream Sandwich is a mouthwatering OS prospect that will intelligently adapt to even the tiniest Android phones as well as 10 inch tablets.
According to Engadget it will even give you resizable status bars that will move across each form factor, as well as delicious new additions, such as face-tracking and camera focus shifting based on voice recognition. This means tablet webcams will shift from person to person as they speak.
More interestingly, Google said at its developer conference that it will also be able to interact with home appliances and other hardware.
The moves are aimed at devouring its principal competitor, Apple – indeed the overwhelming image portrayed at the conference was of the green Android robot taking a big bite out of an apple.
Google has recorded more than 100 million Android activations to date, and the number of Android activations per day has increased to 400,000. There are also now more than 200,000 applications in the Google Android market and 4.5 billion Android applications have been downloaded and installed.
Google is also working with HTC, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, Vodafone, and Motorola among others to standardise new Android release distribution and speed up the roll out of Android upgrades.
Two cloud services, one a video service that allows Android users to rent movies through the Android Market, play them back on any supported Android device or YouTube, and the other, a music service that allows users to copy digital music collections to the cloud, stream songs to supported Android devices, and cache recently played or specified songs locally for playback without a network connection have also been announced.
