Google I/O 2011: Android Ice Cream Sandwich to Unite Smartphones & Tablets in Q4

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We told you a while ago that the next-gen Android OS version from Google would be Ice Cream Sandwich and today the company made it official at its I/O event. The new OS is expected to “work anywhere” and it seems to be the kind of firmware that will unite your Android smartphone and tablet experience.

Ice Cream Sandwich is going to be for smartphones, tablets and other Android-powered machines what iOS 4 was for Apple’s iDevices last year, a unified platform that will offer the same features, or most of them, on any Android device it gets installed on.

Naturally, Gingerbread is not even out yet on most Android handsets, so don’t expect Ice Cream Sandwich anytime soon. The new ICS will be available later in Q4, and we don’t have a determined launch date for it yet.

In fact it’s pretty annoying not to see more features for Ice Cream Sandwich out right now. We know the new OS will bring some of the features found on Honeycomb tablets, like the holographic user interface, multitasking, a new launcher and improved widgets, but that’s really not enough for our taste. Google doesn’t seem ready, or interested, to truly demo ICS right away, at least not before Apple is going to announce their own next-gen mobile platform next month at WWDC 2011.

I’m not saying that Google is seeking inspiration in iOS 5, although that might be the case, and I wouldn’t blame them either if they did considering the tough environment the smartphone business really is. And maybe Google is trying to protect its innovations by not unveiling some of the hot stuff coming to its Android platform right away. But the fact is that Ice Cream Sandwich, as teased today at Google I/O, is not a complete Android OS one could talk about yet. It’s just a confirmed name of a mobile OS that’s going to be launched at some point in the following six months during which time it will probably see a lot of modifications. In other words we can certainly be disappointed about not seeing an actual Ice Cream Sandwich demo yet, although the ICS bits offered at Google I/O so far were pretty interesting even if they were mostly related to camera interaction.