Google to Update Andriod Operating System by Q4

Google Android offered developers a number of factors to cheer Tuesday with the announcement of new versions of the mobile os and the addition of music and films to the Android Marketplace.

Google will pursue the goal of having a single operating system for all types of smartphones and tablet devices.
Ice Cream Sandwich will contain a revamped application framework with new functionality and APIs (application programming interfaces) designed to automatically reconfigure applications to different mobile devices, Google officials said during the opening keynote of the company’s I/O developer conference in San Francisco.

Ice Cream Sandwich is due in the fourth quarter, so over time Google releases Android 3.1, an update to the Honeycomb, which is intended for tablet devices. Its enhancements include making Android tablet devices USB hosts, so that USB devices can be hooked up to them, and allowing Android developers to create applications for the Google TV platform.

Google also announced that from Tuesday the Market features movies to rent and stream-line and in equipment. Rent starts at $1.99. Customers will have 30 days to start watching the rented movie, and once started, the film is viewed inside of 24 hours.

Officials also confirmed that it is in a private beta test of a cloud-based music service known as Music Beta, at this time available by invitation only to U.S. Users.
It has a music manager app and lets users to import their iTunes library, including playlists. A feature called Instant Mix generate playlists on the fly based on a selected genre or song from the user library.

Music Beta will be free throughout its beta period, and has a capacity for 20,000 songs.

Hugo Barra, Android product management director, said more than 100 million Android devices have been activated worldwide so far, and that there are more than 450,000 Android developers who have created some 200,000 applications.

End users have installed 4.5 billion Andriod applications so far, with the most recent 1 billion happening in the past 60 days, he said.

There are about 310 different Android devices available in 110 countries, he said. More than 400,000 Android devices activated each day, says Barra.