Rumor: Android 2.4 Ice Cream coming in Summer 2011?

We saw a 'misconfiguration' expose something suspiciously like Android 2.4 on a Sony Ericsson Experia Arc at CES last week, but now Pocket-Lint has come right out and declared Android 2.4 Ice Cream on the way and set for a Summer 2011 release. Sources told the British gadget site that 2.4 would be announced at Google's I/O conference at the beginning of May and that it would land on devices around June/July this year.

This makes for a very Google-like confusion around mobile OS versions (Chrome OS vs. Android anyone?), with Honeycomb to be Android 3.0 resulting in a possible backtrack to 2.4 Ice Cream. Google has stated that Honeycomb, at least initially, is going to be purely for tablets and not smartphones -- perhaps this indicates that Android versions destined for smartphones, such as Ice Cream, will be limited to 2.x version numbers. With Google supposedly slowing down to two Android releases a year, and version numbers being pretty arbitrary for the most part, this seems fairly plausible. Of course, until Google comes out and states on record, or we get some hands on time with unreleased code, treat this as rumor.

Head on over to Pocket-Lint for the full skinny.

Tags: Android, Android 2.4, Android2.4, cellphones, Google, Ice Cream, IceCream