Developers Want Android 4.0 'Ice Cream'

You scream, I scream, Google Android developers scream for "Ice Cream." That was the Monday buzz at San Francisco's Moscone Center, anyway, where Google I/O attendees were lined up to register in advance for Tuesday's big event—and perhaps catch a sneak peak of the latest version of the Android mobile operating system.

Google's rapid-fire development cycle for the OS that runs an increasing number of smartphones, media tablets and other mobile devices has apparently given its developer ecosystem a sweet tooth.

One app developer told that Google TV and the next edition of Android were easily the most intriguing stories to follow at the company's annual developer conference.

Ice Cream, the codename for the version of Android that Google will reportedly launch soon, is expected to combine features from the Android "Honeycomb" OS for tablets and the "Gingerbread" platform for smartphones to create a confection that the search giant's ecosystem hopes will deliver the best of both.

The next version of Android, which has been called both "Ice Cream" and "Ice Cream Sandwich," will bring together the phone and tablet versions of the OS, Google executives said at the Mobile World Congress in February.

"The two of them—notice that one starts with a 'G' and the next one starts with an 'H.' You can imagine the follow-on will start with an 'I' and it will be named after a dessert and it will combine capabilities of both the Gingerbread and the Honeycomb release," Google's then-CEO Eric Schmidt said at the time.

Most observers interpret that to mean that whatever Ice Cream winds up being, it will likely add Honeycomb's robustness and some features of its UI to the Android smartphone OS. Google Android engineering director Dave Burke said at MWC that the next Android release for phones will share Honeycomb's visual cues, its app switcher, and its contextual "action bar."

But it remains to be seen how Google would bridge a hardware-requirement gap between its open-source mobile OS platforms for tablets and smartphones. Google doesn't enforce hardware requirements for Honeycomb, but the company has strongly advised device makers to use dual-core processors for Android 3.0 tablets.