Google has finally officially revealed its next OS as Ice Cream Sandwich at the opening keynote speech of Google I/O, describing it as its 'most ambitious release to date' - but stopped short of naming it Android 2.4.
As we predicted back at Mobile World Congress, Google intends Ice Cream Sandwich to unify its mobile OSes, with Google's Mike Claren saying, "We want one OS that runs everywhere."
To this end, Ice Cream Sandwich will incorporate all the best bits of Honeycomb, the Android tablet OS and make them useable on smartphones too.
Not new, still exciting
These juicy new smartphone tools will include the updated app launcher, holographic user interface, interactive homescreen widgets and the snazzy multi-tasker which we so love on Honeycomb.
As well as this, Google hopes to make life easier for developers by releasing a new set of APIs that will help them to scale their apps across the various form-factors of Android devices – obviously an app is going to look different on a 7-inch tablet than on a 3.7-inch smartphone screen.
Gogo Logo
Google also showed off 3D headtracking using the front-mounted camera, which is a clever little device that can figure out who is speaking and focus on them whilst on a video call.
Most importantly, Google debuted the OS's cute new logo, which you can see above.
Ice Cream Sandwich will be launching on Android devices in Q4 this year, although there's no word yet on minimum hardware requirements.
