Spotted in Linpack for Android

Jul 27, 2010 06:59 GMT  ·  By

Mountain View-based company Google was rumored for a long time now to be already working on the next release of its mobile operating system, dubbed Android 3.0, also known as Gingerbread, and it seems that the first proof of the platform version's existence have started to emerge into the wild. The Android team is already testing out the upcoming solution, which means that the first Android 3.0 builds are already alive on test devices.

The first “live” appearance of Android 3.0, (or different variants of this platform version, such as Android 3.0.1 or 3.2) was announced by GreenComputing (via Phandroid), which spotted the OS in their popular benchmark software Linpack for Android. It seems that, in addition to the officially released versions of Google's mobile operating system, the yet unannounced ones were also running the software solution.

Here's what the company had to say on the matter:

Android 2.2 (FroYo) took the Linpack lead for the most runs this last week. According to my analytics, Android 2.2 was used 43.1% of the time. Android 2.1-update1, the previous leader was used 39.8% of the time. So what was used for the rest of the 17% of the time? How about 158 other ROMs! That is a lot of variety to choose.

Mixed in with the lot is some curious ROMs; Android 3.0, Android 3.0.1 and Android 3.2.

Hopefully, the news indeed involves the use of Android 3.0 on test devices, and those to use it are Google's employees, and not hackers. Chances are that some might indeed be able to fake the version number of the Android OS, though we're not sure how difficult would be to do that. For what it's worth, in case the benchmark data was not faked, Google might be closer than we thought to the release of this Android version.

However, until an official announcement on the existence of Android 3.0 is made, we should take this with a grain of salt. Especially since the photo attached to this article might be a fake as well.

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