Rumor: Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich might come as soon as October

By Mike Dunn August 10, 2011

It’s no secret that Apple will be releasing its new iPhone at some point in the near future. Rumors have the announcement as early as this month, and a release date sometime in September. There is a rumor that Google might be moving up the release date of its Ice Cream Sandwich flavored version of Android to compete with the iPhone.

When the new Android operating system was announced, all we were told is that it would come out some time this year. The last set of rumors we heard put the release around Thanksgiving, just in time for the holiday shopping season. Google might be trying to rain on Apple’s iPhone parade by moving up the release date to sometime in October. The report states that Google might be making the move to help keep original Droid owners on Android, rather than jumping ship once their two year contracts are up.

Ice Cream Sandwich is more than just an update to Google’s phone operating system. ICS will be a unified operating system that users will experience on tablets, phones, and Google TV. Google hopes that it will allow for a seamless ecosystem across all of Google’s platforms. This would be very nice, seeing as Honeycomb and Gingerbread are similar but are not interchangeable.

If there are to be devices launched in October, the safe money would be on a Nexus phone, and maybe even a Nexus-branded tablet. If the rumored specs are true about the next-generation Nexus phone, it will be a real beast of a phone. The phone is rumored to have best-in-class specs across the board, and if it follows tradition will be the first device with ICS. There is still no word on who will be making the Nexus phone for Google, but the two main front runners based on previous Nexus devices have to be HTC and Samsung.

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