Last Thursday, Eric Schmidt sat down for a keynote interview at Dreamforce '11, Salesforce.com's cloud computing conference held in San Francisco. The keynote covered a lot of history, several patent issues, the Motorola acquisition and some broad stroke descriptions for what we can expect from Google in the future. One thing slipped through earlier coverage, though. During a brief discussion on Android (at 30:25 in the link below), Eric Schmidt revealed that Ice Cream Sandwich would be introduced in the October/November timeframe. This plays out with the rumors that the Nexus/Droid Prime would premiere in the November/December time frame. Big news? No, but it does tell us that an SDK might be just a few weeks away. Like we said, this is going to be a busy fall. 

Source: Youtube via Android and Me

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  • titan13131 - Wednesday, September 7, 2011 - link

    Why do they make it skin colored? I thought it was a huge wart!
  • KingstonU - Wednesday, September 7, 2011 - link

    Completely thought the same until I read your comment and looked at it again.
  • Jingato - Wednesday, September 7, 2011 - link

    I thought the Nexus/Droid Prime was expected in October? That's what everything I've read points to. Where did you get November/December?
  • gevorg - Wednesday, September 7, 2011 - link

    Don't be evil Google! You're about to release a new Android, and you still haven't opened the Honeycomb. Does ICS has the same destiny? Won't open Android anymore since you gained the market share you wanted?
  • InsaneScientist - Thursday, September 8, 2011 - link

    They never were planning to open Honeycomb. (This was publicly stated by them. Not just speculation.) It was basically just a test run of the tablet features. Once they got a decent chunk of the bugs ironed out, they'd roll it and the phone OS together into one and release that. That's what Ice Cream Sandwich is. ;-)
    They're also on the record as having said that ICS will be open sourced "by the end of the year."
    There's also some speculation (whether it's based on anything that Google has said or not, I do not know) that they may open source Honeycomb alongside ICS, since there wouldn't be much point in keeping it hidden if its successor was open.
  • JasonInofuentes - Thursday, September 8, 2011 - link

    I'll defer to you on that, I hadn't heard, but I wouldn't be surprised if ICS does open things up. Honeycomb should really be looked at as a Google 1.0 release, or more aptly a Google Beta release. In the right hands it has shown itself to be capable of delivering performance, though a lot of UI tweaks would make it much more user friendly. One reason for this is the short time that Matias Duarte was actually involved in its development. The iPad was announced January of 2010. May 2010 Google poached Matias from the remains of Palm. The Xoom, and thus Honeycomb, were introduced January of 2011. Obviously Google was working on what would become Honeycomb long before they hired Matias, but as the lead designer of the User Experience, he was only at the wheel for seven months or so before they were shipping hardware. That's not a lot of time to refine something so complex.

    Thanks for the comment, keep'em coming.
  • tayb - Thursday, September 8, 2011 - link

    Android is not open.

    Go buy a phone and try to delete the stock apps.
  • B3an - Thursday, September 8, 2011 - link

    LOL.... what?!?!

    Congratulations on posting one of the most insane comments i've ever seen.
  • JarredWalton - Thursday, September 8, 2011 - link

    FYI, the comments were so out there and poorly worded, not to mention having unrelated links to what we're talking about, that I marked the account as spam and his posts are gone. Goodbye, spammer!
  • WeaselITB - Thursday, September 8, 2011 - link

    Hehe - I got a chuckle out of them, at least ... ;-)

    -Weasel

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