Google’s sweet Android is coming soon

THE WORLD IS EXPECTING to hear a release date from Google for the next version of its Android operating system, as its developers have delivered a man-sized Gingerbread man.

It is a veritable dessert stew at Google's headquarters as the search giant's mobile developers have put up huge gingerbread men around the building. The Android developers have posted a Youtube video that shows their unveiling of the gingerbread man and the video is only enigmatically tagged with the line, "We've been baking something... and it's pretty sweet".

We've avoided saying a life-sized version of a gingerbread man because we have no idea how big real gingerbread men grow. But the company did the same thing with previous versions of Android just before it announced an official release date, so it had giant éclairs, donuts, cupcakes and frozen yoghurts (Froyo).

Google still hasn't confirmed whether Gingerbread will be named 3.0 or is, in fact, part of an upcoming 2.3 release. A Google security engineer posted on an Android thread describing 2.3 as kind of a big deal.

"Yes, Android 2.3 is a 'major release', and this patch will be available then," said the engineer.

If it is a big deal, Google might go with Gingerbread as the code name for 2.3. However, the company has only doled out sweety-themed codenames released with number changes on the lefthand side of the decimal point. So we reckon that it'll be Android 3.0 that gets the Gingerbread name.

The INQUIRER reported last week that Google is adding Ice Cream into its sweet-toothed mix as the next codename for Android version 4. It almost sounds like Google is trying to lure unsuspecting children by building the witch's house from Hansel and Gretel. µ