Google makes Ice-Cream out of Gingerbread and Honeycomb and the War of OSes within
Google is going crazy with Operating Systems. They have two – well kinda three – out there already:
phone OS on Android 2.3/2.4 called Gingerbread
a tablet OS on Android 3.0 called Honeycomb
browser-based operating system, Chrome-OS
When you look at the information coming out of Google, you find some contradictory stuff happening there. For One, there is a move to Integrate.
Integration is being planned between Gingerbread and Honeycomb – to create the new Android (4.0?) possibly called IceCream. It promises to be a strange concoction surely! As Rob Jackson reports, the Ice Cream will not just merge these two but also include Google TV:
Not only will Ice Cream merge Gingerbread and Honeycomb, but it will also merge Google TV into the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) Code Branch
Rob is obviously excited about this possibility as it promises to unfold an era where TV and Internet experiences will be merged completely. The immersive experience of technology and entertainment that people have talked all this while, may come to pass based on the nuts and bolts being assembled by Google as we speak.
In case you didn’t catch that… it’s huge news. In my humble opinion, Google TV is an ENORMOUS opportunity for an entire industry (television) to take the leap that it’s promised for decades (Internet TV). With the addition of apps and games from Android Market, I strongly believe Google TV will be a somewhat unstoppable force. We’ve known Google TV is based on Android and Chrome, but merging it into the AOSP branch means a lot of things, starting with Google’s supreme confidence and motivation in Google TV itself.
But if that was the sole direction in which Google was going, it would have been fine. It is also coming out simultaneously with a Tablet based on Chrome-OS! As CNET suggests:
Details in Google’s source code reveal that company programmers have begun building a tablet version of Chrome OS, its browser-based operating system
Now, assuming that Google is not involved in self-competition or Darwinism within its own teams, and also given that fact that ChromeOS is a browser based OS and needs an inherent OS on a tablet to work off of – we might be looking at a device which is being made for “Cloud Computing” as opposed to application native on the device themselves.
But there have been talks of merging the two OSes – Chrome and Android (in its various Avatars), as the question in minds of many folks has been:
After all, why design an open-source operating system with the goal of reinventing the personal computing experience when you’re currently developing another open-source operating system with the goal of reinventing the mobile computing experience?
Sergey Brin – the Google Founder has spoken about that clearly:
“Android and Chrome will likely converge over time,” citing among other things the common Linux and Webkit code base present in both projects.
So, is the future combination of Chrome OS and Android aimed at a new type of device distinct from Android’s smartphones or Chrome OS’s Netbooks??