At this point, we’re considering any date to be the official announcement of Android 2.3, or Gingerbread. We’ve been waiting, and waiting, and waiting for some morsel of information, and once we saw this, it looked like the pieces may indeed be fitting together.
Mr. Android, aka Andy Rubin, will be making an appearance at an upcoming show in San Francisco on the 6th of December. The show is “D: Dive Into Mobile” (yeah, we like the name, too) and it’s entirely possible that Rubin will be dropping some sweet, sweet knowledge on us concerning Gingerbread. This date is quite believable, as it falls right in line with Eric Schmidt’s words saying that the Android update should be announced with in the next couple of weeks – the D: Dive Into Mobile show will be exactly three weeks since Schmidt hinted at the release.
As I’ve said before, Google better deliver with Gingerbread. The OS update has been extremely over-hyped, and once it drops, people will begin to pick it a part. That will be the case with every update for any mobile OS, but iOS, WebOS, and WP7 are already very nice-looking on their own, and Gingerbread is said to be focused on user experience. If all Duarte has done is make the notification bar black and make the selection highlights green with Gingerbread, people may soon be turned off to the OS. We’re putting our money on Gingerbread bringing a much snazzier UI to Android.
That said, the real deal is Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” OS. Android 2.3 Gingerbread won’t step the OS up to 3.0 status, so we’ll likely have to wait until the next major platform update before we see any real optimizations for tablet devices.
Who knows at this point when we’ll see Gingerbread. We know the Nexus One will get it first, and others likely will have to wait months before they can get the newest version Android on their handset.
So, what’s your bet for an Android Gingerbread release date?