The naming/numbering system for Android has become increasingly complex since the arrival of Honeycomb 3.0 for tablets. Now we have word from Pocket-Lint who say that Android 2.4 will be landing earlier than expected in April. However, Android 2.4 won’t be a new landmark release, it will just be a refresh of Gingerbread bringing dual-core app support (designed for Honeycomb) to single-core handsets.
If true, it could mean that the upcoming Sony Ericsson Xperia smartphones may very well be lagging behind on the Android OS front even before they launch. The Xperia arc, Xperia Play and Xperia Neo will run Android 2.3 Gingerbread on release. However SE has said that it plans to move much faster with Android updates in the future. It looks like they may be put to the test sooner than expected.
Update: As we were reminded in the comments, the Xperia arc was already spotted running Android 2.4. At the time this was put down to as a “misconfiguration” error, but if Pocket-Lint’s story is true, Sony Ericsson is probably on top of this as we speak.
