Android Ice-Cream Sandwich Coming Late October. OMAP 4 Devices to Get It First?

Remember Notion Ink? Well their CEO, Rhan Shravan, says that Android Ice-Cream Sandwich is coming out late October, and we should probably believe him, because he’s the one who also told us about Gingerbread a few days before it launched last year. He casually mentions this in one of his blog posts, saying ICS will come out late October, and their Adam tablet will get the update in November.

Now, their Adam tablet is based on Tegra 2, but he confirms that ICS’ chip of choice will be the OMAP 4, but that either means there will be an update for Tegra 2 and Kal-EL devices later, or it should already work on Tegra 2 devices at least, since it’s supposed to be based on the Honeycomb code, and all Honeycomb devices already have the drivers for Tegra 2.

If the ICS code doesn’t include the drivers for Tegra 2, then we might see the update coming mainly to OMAP 4 devices early on, such as the Droid Bionic, LG Thrill/Optimus 3D, and Droid 3. I’m not sure if this means it will come to OMAP 3 devices soon, too, because OMAP 4 should have a pretty different architecture than OMAP 3.

What we can take from this is that the Nexus Prime (or whatever it’s called) will arrive as soon as late October (that could be just one or two weeks away from iPhone 5 launch), and it’s just one month before we see what Ice-Cream Sandwich is all about.

The bad part about this is that if Android Ice-Cream Sandwich doesn’t support Kal-El out of the gate, we might not see Kal-El tablets with ICS on them launching this year. We’ll still probably see Kal-El tablets, like the Transformer 2, but it will arrive with Honeycomb 3.2 or something. It would be even more disappointing if it arrives after we already see ICS, because obviously everyone will want ICS then.

But so far I’ve noticed the Honeycomb tablets have received updates pretty quickly, and that whole process might’ve been improved with Android Ice-Cream Sandwich as well, so it might not take that long to see it on Tegra 2 and Kal-El tablets.

Source: Notion Ink; Via: AndroidCentral