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Display specialist Viewsonic said that the firm’s upcoming ViewPad 4 smartphone will launch in April with the Android 2.4 operating system, according to a pocket-lint report.
The unnamed Viewsonic source, reportedly told the gadget site that Android 2.4 would still be called ‘Gingerbread’ and the release had been brought forward to improve compatibility of Android 3.0 Honeycomb-developed applications.
Applications designed with dual-core processors in mind will not work with the current Android 2.3 they said, hence the maintenance update.
Pocket-lint speculated that this is why manufacturers have so far not rushed ahead with Android 2.3 updates, potentially waiting for Android 2.4 instead. So far only the Samsung-made Google Nexus S has shipped with Android 2.3.
The unnamed Viewsonic source said that the firm’s ViewPad 4 smartphone would be "one of the first multi-media handsets to be supported by Google’s new operating system."
The news adds further fuel to speculation that Android 3.x for tablets will be effectively a ‘fork’ of the Android 2.x series for smartphones.
