Google announces Ice Cream Sandwich and more

Google has announced the latest version of Android called 'Ice cream Sandwich', a new music service called Google Music Beta and Movie Rentals on the Android platform.



During the keynote at Google IO developer conference in San Francisco, Google also announced that they have activated more than 100 million Android devices worldwide which are powered by more than 200,000 apps in the Android market. Users have downloaded more than 4.5 billion apps from the market.


Google's Ice Cream Sandwich will be available for both smartphones and tablets in September/ October 2011. Google also showcased some new virtual camera scanning technologies, which will be used in Ice-cream Sandwich.  

A new beta cloud music service will also be launched today for US customers through invites. It supports song uploads of up-to 20,000 songs for free till the app is in beta. Users will be able to stream music directly from the Google Music accounts directly on their phones, tablets and PCs. They will all be synced to each other, without the need of any wires. Other salient features of this service include an automatic playlist creator called Instant Mix.
 
Google also announced the Android music player app seen on Honeycomb will soon will be available for Android 2.2 and 2.3 smartphones.

Aside from this Google announced an update for their newly launched Honeycomb operating system called Honeycomb 3.1. The new version will feature resizable widgets, an improved app switcher and USB host functionality. Users will now be able to connect their cameras directly to the new Android devices to transfer photos and use normal USB keyboard, mice and game controllers. The new version of Honeycomb will be available to all Motorola Xoom Verizon 3G customers from Wednesday.
 
Honeycomb 3.1 will also be available for Google TV and so will be the Android Marketplace. 

Google users in the US will also now be able to rent movies for 24 hours, starting at $1.99.